
Show HN: Manifold – Find, buy, and manage developer services - pcpc
https://manifold.co/
======
pcpc
Hey everyone! We’ve been working on this for the past few months and would
love your feedback. :) You can use Manifold to buy and manage services like
LogDNA, Mailgun, JawsDB, Bonsai, Scout, RedisGreen, and Memcachier. We’re
starting small and adding services slowly but eventually we’d like to add many
more services and a more integrated developer experience (e.g. a CLI). We are
in a very early stage, so we hope it can be of some use to you.

We’d love any questions, advice, or thoughts you have on the direction we’re
taking. One thing we’re really passionate about is making the sum greater than
the parts with our services, and we’d really be curious about whether adding
specific types of services or building integrations feels more useful in
accomplishing this. Thanks!

~~~
leeab
Congratulations on the launch!! LogDNA is proud to be a part of the Manifold
journey. Can't wait to see what's in store next!

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rdegges
Wow. I'm a bit surprised this isn't on the front page already.

This is such a cool service.

I've had the pleasure of knowing Peter (and a decent amount of his team)
through their work @ Heroku over the years, and have always been a huge fan of
their work. I had dinner with Peter and team a couple of weeks ago, and was
100% psyched to learn that manifold was going to be launching soon.

The problem they're trying to solve is that purchasing / managing subscription
services for developers is tricky.

If you've ever used a platform like Heroku, it's extremely convenient to
manage additional developer services because you can easily provision /
upgrade / downgrade / remove them using a consistent interface (billing
included). But the problem here is that you're bound to Heroku specifically.

I've often wanted to have a similar place to purchase all my services for apps
(and companies) and have them bound to an independent identity: that way I can
carry them with me wherever I might need them, and for whatever projects I
might have.

The other important part of this here (which is where I hope Manifold will be
particularly useful) is helping me (a developer) figure out what services to
use.

The problem I have now is that when I work on applications, I'll need to
provision Redis. So if I'm on Amazon I might use ElastiCache, or RedisGreen,
or some other provider, but being able to sort through them, compare them, see
reviews / rankings, etc., is all really important.

Anyhow: I'm really excited! Congrats on the launch!

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nicoslepicos
Pretty excited to see where this product goes :)

Makes a lot of sense to just have everything managed and billed under one
umbrella. What aspects do you see as the main benefits of the service? Do you
have any services you are particularly interested in bringing on board?

Also, design is on point - great job team!

~~~
pcpc
I think _today_ the primary benefits are having a single identity and source
of payment, essentially to simplify cloud service management. (though the
value there will grow as we add more services) In the longer term, I'd love to
figure out ways to help our partners complement/sell each other. Being able to
have datastores automatically connect to your logging/monitoring, or having a
really great CLI experience to connect and deploy pieces and bits in
complementary ways.

As far as services go, we're pretty mixed of opinion right now. I think we
have a great story for Ruby developers and think it would be great if we could
cater to Node next. James on our team would like Go or Rust, Matt on our team
would like to go serverless or maybe even GraphQL-related services (but he's a
bit of a futurist).

If you have suggestions/a wishlist, let us know!

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chrisab
Congrats on the launch, what's in-store for the next 3-6 months?

Happy to be part of the journey.

~~~
pcpc
I think it's going to be a balance of figuring out the right mix of services
(i.e. do we target really specific developer communities and add the services
that they are interested in) and building out our developer experience (e.g.,
a CLI tool, integrations with particular clouds, etc).

I think it's easy for us to say we'll do both, but since we're a small team I
think it'll be a mix of selectively bringing in really well-loved services and
figuring out what our customers want (if anything) from an integration
perspective.

