Timeline 2004–2014: the decade when each of the three historically-expensive parts independently got cheap

Timeline of the three drivers converging (2004–2014):

• 2004 — Ruby on Rails open-sourced July 2004 (DHH from Basecamp); v1.0 December 2005 — convention-over-configuration; OpenStreetMap founded 2004 by Steve Coast — response to UK Ordnance Survey not releasing data freely; OSMF established 2006
• 2005 — Django created 2003 at Lawrence Journal-World; released publicly 2005 — "batteries-included," built-in admin/auth/ORM
• 2006 — Amazon S3 launched March 14, 2006 at $0.15/GB — object storage as a metered utility; Amazon EC2 launched as limited public beta August 25, 2006 — single m1.small instance at $0.10/hour
• 2009 — data.gov launched May 21, 2009 with 47 datasets — now 370,000+ (with >2,000 removed Jan 2025); Amazon RDS announced October 2009 (MySQL first); GA May 31, 2011 — managed DB absorbs admin/backup/failover
• 2010 — Elasticsearch first release 2010 — open-source on Apache Lucene; commodity search
• 2011 — Stripe launched 2011 — card data never touches merchant server (Stripe.js → token), removing the heaviest PCI burden; D3.js released 2011 by Mike Bostock (with Heer & Ogievetsky, Stanford) — foundational data-viz building block
• 2012 — Algolia founded 2012 (Dessaigne & Lemoine; Y Combinator W2014) — search-as-a-service, no infra to manage
• 2013 — Auth0 founded 2013 — managed identity, social login, SSO, SAML
• 2014 — AWS Lambda previewed November 13, 2014; GA April 9, 2015 — code with no servers to provision; Amazon Cognito and Firebase Auth — 2014-era managed identity peers to Auth0

Source: Synthesis of the dated atomic entries above.

Confidence: Verified (each dated entry).

Why this matters for Candid: The decade 2004–2014 is when each of the three historically-expensive parts independently got cheap. This is the spine of R1 — Anchor the falling-cost case on the decade 2004–2014 (infrastructure + parts + data); AI-assisted coding is NOT the spine and the reason the falling-cost case does not depend on AI-assisted coding. See R2 — Keep AI-assisted coding at the margin; it lowers assembly labor recently but is not a structural driver.