Austen Collins

CEO & Founder, Lambda

Search every verified Austen Collins interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Austen Collins, founder and CEO of Serverless Inc., discussed the upcoming Serverless Framework v4 in a December 2023 podcast. He stated that the new version would introduce a revenue-based pricing model, charging companies with over $2 million in revenue for future versions, while also adding the ability to switch between containers and Lambda functions as deployment targets. Collins described the change as a shift from giving away the open-source framework and monetizing elsewhere, and he characterized serverless as "still the best option in town by far" for getting to market at low cost. He also commented on the broader infrastructure landscape, noting challenges such as anti-competitive licenses and a "Russian doll effect" where projects reuse each other's components. In earlier appearances, Collins has consistently described serverless computing as the natural evolution of the cloud and emphasized the goal of reducing deployment speed to around three seconds. He has spoken about the importance of developing directly on cloud infrastructure rather than relying on local emulation, and has advocated for separating infrastructure resources from frequently deployed code to avoid deployment issues. Collins has also discussed his involvement in the NFT market, describing it as a community-driven space and stating that "play-to-earn NFTs are going to change everyone's life," while cautioning that research is necessary to avoid projects that are "rug pulls" or derivative works.