> and I deposit my check for $0.

Given the number of Nomad fans that show up to every one of these threads, I don't think that's the whole story given https://www.hashicorp.com/products/nomad/pricing (and I'll save everyone the click: it's not $0)

Reasonable people can 100% disagree about approaches, but I don't think the TAM for "software to host a web app" is as small as you implied (although it certainly would be if we took your description literally)

fly.io, vercel, and heroku shows you're right about the TAM for the broader problem, and that it's possible to capture some value somewhere, but that's a different beast entirely than just selling a standard solution to a standard problem.

Developers are a hard market to sell to, and deployment software is no exception.