Paul, the incentives you've put into place with this business will destroy your company. The proposition you've set up for developers is to build their buildings on land you still own. Established developers already understand the risks associated with this practice and will avoid you. At some point if anyone manages to build a business with darklang you will have them over a barrel and they will accept any cost increase below what it would take to switch away from using your platform. If you don't want to raise prices, your successors will.
I don't think this idea will work since there are too many viable options in the marketplace, and people are smart so they will avoid lock-in when they can.
How is this different than running on certain cloud providers? For instance, a team can become deeply integrated with AWS services and then have trouble moving off if AWS starts raising prices.
AWS has competition, there is only one darklang. While it certainly would be difficult for most to move away from their cloud providers, it can be done. Almost all cloud providers are just packaging together open technologies with their established internal conventions. There is a world of difference between "this is a pain in the butt and we should have planned better" and "you have to start over completely from scratch".
How is using APIs for deployment and scaling (from one of the biggest companies in the world) different from writing your entire codebase in a new language introduced by a brand new startup?
I don't think this idea will work since there are too many viable options in the marketplace, and people are smart so they will avoid lock-in when they can.