One aspect of the community's frustration I hadn't fully internalized: ONT likes to lock down their integrated devices. So MinION and P2 Solo have special love from the tinkerers and envelope pushers of the platform, since they are unfettered in terms of what software they load and use during runs to experiment with new adaptive sequencing approaches or other imaginative bounds-pushing.
Oh, and apparently the big P24 and P48 models can't keep up basecalling with more than about 20 flowcells running. The P48 always seemed like an odd duck, with few labs ever having call for that many flowcells running at once. An odd duck that misbehaves is far worse.
2 comments:
You can’t scale a company on vibes and breadcrumbs. This extension is all vibes.
Do the math. Assume every device carries a 5% monthly support tax. Every month, 5% of users need hand-holding, Slack pings, emails, whatever.
Device A sells ~200 units a year. It’s expensive. Buyers are committed, clueful, and usually have institutional support.
Device B sells ~2,000 units a year. It’s dirt cheap, democratizes sequencing, and opens the floodgates to brand-new users.
Congrats, you’ve just gone from supporting 10 customers a month to 100. Same company, same headcount, 10× the noise.
Now reality check: your support team can handle 50 tickets a month before things start to break. You don’t have spare cash to magically hire and train people. You can’t lever up because your stock price has you one bad quarter away from activist investors sharpening knives.
So you look at the P&L like an adult. You compare what those 10 Device A customers actually spend versus the 100 Device B customers. And you make the deeply unsexy decision about which one lets the company survive long enough to matter.
This is what happens when cheap biotech money dries up. British biotech already has a reputation problem, and the vultures are absolutely circling. If ONT doesn’t hit breakeven by ’27, it’s getting carved up.
And now they’re stuck supporting an installed base well beyond for zero incremental revenue, because they blinked when the loudest and cheapest segment threw their toys out of the pram. Bravo, whoever made this decision, bravo.
The solution to "a high-demand product is too cheap" is to increase the cost of that product, not stop the supply of that product entirely. It's basic economics: when demand is too high to fit with the available supply, you increase the cost to rebalance that demand.
ONT has recently increased their kit consumable costs; why not increase the ongoing warranty / support cost for P2s as well? If the P2s support cost were priced relative to the capital cost at the same ratio as a P2i, it would be about $4,500 per year. If it were priced at the same ratio as a P48, it would be about $2,000 per year.
Why not increase the PromethION flow cell cost? It produces around five times the amount of data as a MinION flow cell, but is only about 25% more expensive.
There are many different financial knobs that ONT could tweak, and the one they've chosen is to set demand for their P2s product to zero in five months time, killing both the capital revenue for new customers, as well as additional warranty / support revenue for existing customers. That is not a rational financial decision, even from a company that is only interested in stock prices increasing.
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