Thanks Chris for the very interesting article and thanks Site Point for publishing it.
I find the service very interesting personally. I’d just like to point out what I consider kinks in the armour from a customer’s business perspective.
The pricing structure starts off with a licensing cost structure and that goes a bit against the principles of the “pay for what you actually use” construct of cloud computing, which PaaS is a part of. Yes, for the platform and the work that goes into it, there should be a price and $10 per person per month is relatively fair.
However, the usage of the platform, should have much more clear pricing. How much is the database usage? How much is the application node usage? How much for bandwidth? etc. If this is all based on a environment price, then the customer is often paying for something they aren’t getting and over the years, this simply works against the customer. (they might as well own their own server stack). This kind of pricing is the old “rake’em over the coals” attitude of enterprise business, which companies like Oracle have been known to take clear advantage of. So, I have to ask, who are their real customers? Their pricing, at first glance, seems reasonable, but there are other costs involved. These are sort of explained in one line (the smallest) on their pricing page and there is no way, this can be “all of it”.
As for the services offered. It is interesting they went with MariaDB. They say “massively scalable”. Well, MariaDB isn’t massively scalable. If they had said they offer MySql Cluster, I might have considered that somewhat massively scalable. But, that is questionable too. So, as a user I’d actually be worried about scalability and how they handle it.
But then they might say, well, we do have Solr and Redis and these are massively scalable. Then I would counter, uh. Nope. Redis is still far from massively scalable. It is still a single thread single process system, which means multicore architecture isn’t even taken advantage of. There is Redis Cluster and if they were to say that is what they offer, then I might agree with massive scalability with Redis. But, there is no mention of it being used.
Solr is another story. It was built for horizontal scalability, like most NoSQL databases. But then, it is only a datastore to support a powerful search engine and not really a datastore for data persistence. So, from a database perspective, I am covered on search for scalability, but not really for the core database. And, what interests me most is, in general for a platform, the database costs are some of the highest of any services offered, yet there is no mention of extra costs for a growing database. From my experience, a GB of database storage in a PaaS like service should be around $20-$40 per GB. Yet, there is no mention of database costs at all.
From a pricing standpoint, I am just not certain what is going on. I can have 10 developers, working on multiple dev environments. Ok. From what I understand, that would be 10 x 10 = $1000 per month. That is considerably cheaper than needing server admins in my team to keep up infrastructure. But now I want to go to production. Now I must pay for a production environment. Ok. The basic one is $50 per month.But the largest environment is 7GB. Not exactly killing it on power. What kind of compute power is behind that 7GB too? And 7GB of what kind of memory?
Again, from a business perspective, my costs as a customer aren’t clearly provided. Just as an example of cost transparency done right, check out Heroku. https://www.heroku.com/pricing At first you might say, Heruko is a lot less transparent, because there are so many things to account for. But actually, they are a lot more transparent, just like any PaaS should be.
My intention is not to hack on Platform.sh, but to try and demonstrate missing clarity in their pricing structures. As a supporter of PaaS, I really hope Platform.sh can come through and be more transparent. I think they need to think a bit more about their license and environment cost structures and depict their prices better accordingly, so there are no surprises on both sides. 
Scott