To be completely honest, if I were LWD, I'd adopt a 3-tier structure for HeroLab Online.

Tier 1 - $2/month - you have to pay for each game system and expansion

Tier 2 - $10/month - you get full access to one game system and ALL expansions. Additional game systems can be licensed in the case that you just want one or two.

Tier 3 - $20/month - you get access to ALL game systems and ALL expansions.

They have already said the licensing agreements don't allow that.

Yep, too bad too. The buy in cost for a new pathfinder player is really high. But $10/month would probably be a bit more palatable.

I seriously doubt they're running this on their own hardware. If they're smart, they'll run it on Google Cloud.

The thing is, Pathfinder is a unique situation; the amount of paid content for it is far beyond any other system Hero Lab supports; even Shadowrun doesn't come anywhere close.

Class packs are a good way for people who are players to buy in cheaply. And remember that you don't really need to buy everything at once.

You still need an server admin if you host with AWS. Someone needs to manage the servers. Someone here may have determined whether Realmworks is hosted on AWS, some where else or on private servers, haven't looked into it.

No, you don't.
One of the points of cloud platforms is that there are no servers for the customer to deal with. The host company provides a certain amount of computing power and storage to the client company. The host is responsible for administering the hardware, real or virtual.

The client company is really only responsible for maintaining the HLO application. So if somebody pushes a build that crashes when the user tries to equip a ring of protection, Lone Wolf is going to have to scramble to fix it. If the Houston datacenter goes offline, Google, Amazon, or whoever will have rerouted traffic, and re-replicated data, before anyone at Lone Wolf knows something happened.

This model is really good for a product like HLO, because the costs scale with load, and increasing HLO's load allocation takes at most a minute or two. If they were running their own datacenter, or in a CoLo, they'd have to predict how much hardware and bandwidth they'd need, buy it ahead of time, and hope they were correct. If not, they'd either have wasted resources on idle hardware, or not be able to meet their customers' usage. Then they'd have to properly predict the growth rate or have the same problems. Niantic didn't realize how popular Pokemon Go would be in the first week, but because they were running on GCP, they just had to allocate some more compute power and things went relatively smoothly for their customers.

This thread is officially being closed due to there being too many similarly named threads with overlapping information. Please post further questions and comments about Hero Lab Online and Starfinder within the thread linked below:
http://forums.wolflair.com/showthread.php?t=59134

Thanks!