Matt

AWS, or any pay by usage services is not the smartest of choices for individual sites. It's fantastic if you need scalability but not when you're managing a few sites. I'll leave their analytics below so you can gauge for yourself what my "needs" are.
My monthly costs is exactly $69. That includes the server machine (OVH) and a cPanel license. One of these sites is a marketplace with thousands of files and thousands of daily active users. My machine's average load is 5% CPU and 40% memory. So to put it in perspective, even if you have a busy site, you don't need anything fancy. My page speeds are incredibly fast thanks to caching and MySQL optimizations. No RDS, ALB, LMNOP, etc.
So in the nicest way possible, I think he's spending that much because he has an overly complicated setup with diminishing returns. Though to be fair he could just have a disgusting amount of traffic and dynamic content to handle.
Full disclaimer, I don't know how these stats stack up to yours, or Randy's but I know for me personally switching to cloud is just not an option. I'd be paying quite literally 1,000% more. Not to mention you'd be at the mercy of IPS to keep your services online.
Site #1

Site #2

Site #3

Now just add real time views and typing to self hosting and I'll sign a NCA (Non-crying agreement) for an entire year.

I'm glad you highlighted these! We genuinely care about Invision clients and want you to know that your words don't fall on deaf ears. We are def listening 🥲 

But in all seriousness I do understand self-hosted clients' side of things. I was a self-hoster for 10+ years before moving my community to the cloud. It's been an amazing switch (and no Matt didn't slip me a $20 to say that). It genuinely has been a great experience.
I do understand not everyone is in a position to move and feels frustrated hearing about features they, at this moment, can't include. I think having these conversations are important and I hope we can learn to see eye-to-eye. At the end of the day we're all here because we love Invision Community. 

Guys, the irony is the amount of replies this blog has had has kept it trending for days.

Guys, the irony is the amount of replies this blog has had has kept it trending for days.

Guys, the irony is the amount of replies this blog has had has kept it trending for days.

Guys, the irony is the amount of replies this blog has had has kept it trending for days.

You can't really believe that. Complaining is what got us Zapier for self hosting and the return of 6 month renewals instead of 12 months, and a dismissible "upgrade to cloud button" just to name a few within the past couple months. 🙂

If you mean during IPS 3.x initial days, I would say may be yes. Few times, got response, in ticket center, not our problem, till it got escalated to higher support and code fix was deployed. I always like IPS support during IPS 3.x days, where your support team, used to run extra mile. 
My experience in ticket center wasn't that great in last few months, even though I had practically raised less then few (10 may be?) tickets overall - across 5 IPS licenses. 
Honestly, now a days, it's just requesting support through forums. You do have right to say, set up issue. You can create automation script in support - to diagnose those issues quickly i.e.  disable all addons and plugins. Still an issue, we will take a look. 
To me folks on forum are helpful and share knowledge. To your surprise, someone might even put a tutorial, to install and configure for various OS. Their used to be topics/tutorials on MySQL, Apache, NGINX (FURL), etc. optimization/configuration.
We share different opinion i.e. it's completely related to support and I respectfully disagree. I hope that's understandable. 

So what's the problem here? They pay for support. If IPS doesn't want to have to deal with 3rd party software they can make it so. Using the excuse of it adding more overhead to support while charging more for support is ridiculous.
There's absolutely no excuse for excluding these features outside of pushing people to cloud. I do not have Redis installed, therefore I do not use features that use Redis. It would be the same concept with NodeJS. If I don't want to worry about the hassle I simply don't install it, and the feature remains disabled.

No problem at all.  But like the saying goes “don’t go lookin’ for trouble”. 

It’s funny how a few people are getting all bent out of shape and taking this so personally like a personal attack upon their very character. It’s been said for a LONG time that there would eventually be a few cloud specific features. 

Now that it’s happened, people freak out declaring the end of self hosting. The features that are cloud only are not out of the world game changers. If you think they’re able to be developed in a different way that does not require advanced server configuration, get a developer to do it. Heck, charge money for it and make a bundle.  You’ll be able to make some money and then “stick it to the man”. 
However I’m willing to bet you will find there is a lot more involved than just slap up a node instance.  You’ll also most likely figure out why they made the decision they did when you try to do it yourself. I’ve run large scale deployments for years and I’ve learned it’s never as simple as it is first thought to be.

IPS has made a decision that it did not make sense to try and make these features stand alone.  Not to personally insult you and destroy you and your community but instead that it did not make business sense for them to do so. 

If people got as upset in “the real world” as they do here about minor changes, this world might actually be a better place. 

Other than the 150+ bug fixes, let's run through new stuff that we've announced:
[Cloud Only] Trending content
[All platforms] Simpler Theme Editing
[All platforms] Better inbox controls
[Cloud Only] Image scanner/moderation (no blog yet but discussed on the forums)
[All platforms] Alert System
[Cloud Only] Realtime "live community" features (no blog yet but discussed on the forums)
[All platforms] Improved Captcha
[Cloud Only] Sentiment analysis (no blog yet but discussed on the forums)
[All platforms] Improved SEO
[All platforms] Data Layers (no blog yet, but discussed on the forums)

I cannot see how anyone can claim that we only build new features solely for the cloud platform. It just isn't true.

Hi Markus, we will continue to evaluate which features best suit each package. We have tailored our packages to suit the different styles and levels of community needs. We are not looking to offer features on a module basis at this time.

Hi Matt,
usually you don't reply to my posts, I still write 😛
To put something like two new blocks of "trending content" in a $549 package - I'd be ashamed. Already $149 is a lot, but still somehow justifiable for ambitious projects. Developing AI image moderation and object tagging, that I understand as a challenge, but not two blocks of "trending content".
And what I also still don't understand: Technically your focus is still on the forum, the gallery hasn't had a major update in a very long time. Is the AI supposed to help moderate photos in forums, where they should be blowing up most threads? Or maybe something is still happening with the gallery?
Greetings from Berlin
Claudia

Hi @Matt,
Can you comment on why trending content and similar content suggestions is only available for $549 / month and not on the Creator Pro plan or on a modular basis? And do you plan any changes of the price system here?
I am a generally satisfied cloud user so far and for many years, but it does not feel good to be excluded from such features. 
Thanks,
Markus

We have moved away from monolithic releases every 18 months. We decided to call this release 4.7 solely because we increased the minimum PHP versions and refactored a lot of the cloud platform code. We do not hold back features for these major releases. Some features that came with monthly releases during 4.6 included the new word submission block feature, support for Indexnow, new web hook trigger points, achievement improvements and import/export and more. We could have held those all back for 4.7.0 but chose not to.

We are committed to bringing better stability and efficiency, new features and updates across all platforms almost every single month. Not many community platforms can say that. 😇

We do want to bring more updates to the messenger. This was just a little change to make handling alert replies easier.

This is 100% on the "phase 2" list.

The change author option is there for when moderators/team members leave and you want their alerts to persist. 

We do want to bring more updates to the messenger. This was just a little change to make handling alert replies easier.

We do want to bring more updates to the messenger. This was just a little change to make handling alert replies easier.

This is 100% on the "phase 2" list.

That good one indeed, well done IPS.

Very powerful tool. Great job!