The most important user is us—the development organization. While our mission is to keep our users happy by delivering software that scales, we need to keep ourselves happy too. And that requires a viable business model. The reason we care about this is because different models mean different approaches to acquire new users, and manage existing users. From there, the complexities of scaling our user base get deeper. We need to consider how our users are organized, how they use our software to communicate with one another, how to provide support, collect feedback, and collect user metrics.

Viable business models for JavaScript applications range from deploying a free service that's ad-supported, to a private, on-premise deployment of our software, where we collect license fees. Deciding which approach is right for the organization is likely out of our hands. However, it's our responsibility to understand the chosen business model and relate it to the current and future users...