There's a lot of potential for such a service as a consultancy - advice and in-house customization included along with the software. As cool as the Segment stack is, it doesn't let people off the hook for designing effectively in the first place, or for taking a poor design and re-engineering it.
My initial approach with the-startup-stack[1] was exactly that.
Building an open source solution with a "pro" level all setup included in it. I had a very hard time quantifying how much companies will pay for this and whether they even will.
How I see it, you are either on Heroku (or other similar) and you don't care about anything except `git push` or you have a full blown stack.
I know the middle ground between the two is where the stack is but I just couldn't figure out how many companies are actually experiencing those difficulties and how much are they willing to pay for the help.
Since it's not a startup for me, it's just an open source project I decided not to worry about it, but would still be nice to get some input.
Based on personal experience, I strongly suspect there is a market for that type of middle ground. Also, the author of the top level comment in this subthread said they are doing commercial consulting work, so that shows there is some market for it. Given, he/she did not say how good business was, where/how/if they find customers, if they are profitable, etc.
