Designing the Arkos Business Model

Arkos began as a vision for a new way to code — where systems are drawn, not scaffolded; where logic lives inside diagrams; and where tests define behavior before code is written.

But vision alone doesn’t make a product sustainable.
It has to make sense as a business.

This post explores the business plan behind Arkos — not just how to monetize it, but how to build something valuable, defendable, and scalable.

Who Is Arkos For?

At its core, Arkos is for developers.
But not all developers.

It’s for:

Indie devs building systems alone

Small teams at startups who need fast iteration

Infrastructure-minded engineers who want composability

Product engineers who want visibility without the abstraction tax

Eventually, it could expand to:

Agencies who reuse patterns across clients

DevOps teams creating blueprints for internal teams

Education platforms teaching system design through interaction

The wedge is technical teams working on modular systems — the kind where context, contracts, and clean architecture matter.

How Does Arkos Make Money?

Here are the most likely monetization strategies:

1. Free Editor, Paid Infrastructure

Let anyone use the local version of Arkos to design systems and write tests.
Charge for deploying those systems to managed infrastructure.

Think:

$0 for visual design + local execution

Pay-per-project or usage-based pricing to host systems in Arkos Cloud

Value = observability, coordination, state tracking, versioning

This aligns with tools like Vercel, Render, and Railway.

2. Pro Features & Templates

Offer the base tool for free, then monetize power users:

Premium blueprints (e.g., auth flows, email workers, queue orchestrators)

Team collaboration features

Git integration, environments, secret management

Replay tools, staging snapshots, etc.

This aligns with the Figma model: free for individuals, monetized for teams.

3. Enterprise Platform

Over time, Arkos becomes a platform:

Enterprise teams define internal blueprints

System diagrams replace docs and onboarding

Everything is validated, tested, and versioned

Sell custom integrations, SSO, audit logs, and self-hosting.

This mirrors Notion, Retool, and GitHub's enterprise playbook.

Why Arkos Is Defensible

Most developer tools fall into two categories:

UI-first tools with limited flexibility (e.g., low-code platforms)

Code-first tools with massive flexibility but poor visibility

Arkos aims to be both:

Diagram-first and test-driven

Visual feedback and typed contracts

Easy enough for fast iteration, powerful enough for scale

Its defensibility comes from its unique UX loop:

Diagrams generate real code

Code is validated by tests inside the system

Modules become reusable and composable over time

The more you use Arkos, the more value it accumulates. That creates switching cost and user lock-in — not by force, but by utility.

What Success Looks Like

In 1 year:

A working MVP that proves the end-to-end loop

A small but passionate community of developers building in it

A few commercial projects running fully on Arkos

In 3 years:

A rich ecosystem of blueprints, modules, and plugins

Cloud hosting for Arkos-native apps

Teams paying for real-time collaboration, deploy previews, and integrated CI

In 5+ years:

Arkos becomes the way to build composable systems

You don’t write glue code — you draw the system

Infrastructure, tests, and contracts are baked in from day one

Closing Thoughts

Arkos started as a product idea — a tool to make coding visual and systems understandable.

But the more I explored it, the more it looked like a platform. Not just a new editor, but a new interface for how software is shaped.

And if that’s the case, it’s not just a design problem — it’s a business problem. One I’m excited to build into.