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Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button

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Re: Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button

#11

Post by sungrokshim »

theturtletalks wrote: post #9
mushufasa wrote: post #5

I looked into porter at the time we were migrating from Heroku to AWS! I thought it would have been a great solution if it was mature when we first started on heroku. At this point, I have to ask: what's your business model? The reason heroku never made it easy to migrate is the incentive you point out. What's yours?

They charge for managing the kubernetes instance that’s running on your infrastructure. What’s cool is that you can stop using Porter once everything on AWS/Azure/GCP is set-up and you’re not locked in. You just have to manage the cluster yourself.

yup exactly. we also offer volume discounts on Porter as you scale so the cost grows logarithmically as opposed to exponentially. Our philosophy is that we should win on merit not inertia. If the customer doesn't continue to see value, you can offboard and start managing devops on your own.

Re: Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button

#12

Post by mushufasa »

mushufasa wrote: post #5

I looked into porter at the time we were migrating from Heroku to AWS! I thought it would have been a great solution if it was mature when we first started on heroku. At this point, I have to ask: what's your business model? The reason heroku never made it easy to migrate is the incentive you point out. What's yours?

To wit, I ask because:

1. key to a buying decision: I see the documentation for Eject and it looks good, though like any product you'll only able to support it over time if it makes business sense for you

2. I'm interested in this challenge generally cross-industry for companies that sell 'get off the ground' services to startups, on a high margin usage-based model. It's a business model with a constant sword of Damocles, because if your customers do well they would have to leave.

AFAIK the only real solutions

- technical lock-in, either by making it concretely hard or "soft" hard (introduce a whole training regime for employees based on your systems with idiosyncratic concepts and terminologies, so the human skills aren't transferrable)

- build out a kitchen sink featureset including niche products specific to enterprises (a lot of GRC stuff), so they'll keep paying you high margins at scale (this is AWS's journey.)

- invest/take equity in your customers (this is only a partial solution but if they leave at least you'll capture some upside. See: Peak6/Apex & Robinhood)

- capping your fees to a flat upper rate (this will destroy your own expected customer LTV though you keep the customer)

- lock-in long multiyear contracts (this is also a partial solution)

- become an IP troll (e.g. oracle badgering it's legacy customers)

- deliver revenue or addressable markets to your customers that they wouldn't otherwise be able to get (no iOS developers choose it *because of* Xcode or Swift; it's the marketplace)

Re: Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button

#13

Post by mushufasa »

theturtletalks wrote: post #9
mushufasa wrote: post #5

I looked into porter at the time we were migrating from Heroku to AWS! I thought it would have been a great solution if it was mature when we first started on heroku. At this point, I have to ask: what's your business model? The reason heroku never made it easy to migrate is the incentive you point out. What's yours?

They charge for managing the kubernetes instance that’s running on your infrastructure. What’s cool is that you can stop using Porter once everything on AWS/Azure/GCP is set-up and you’re not locked in. You just have to manage the cluster yourself.

I meant: what's the business model for Eject specifically? Why make it easy for customers to leave (aside from pre-empting buying-decision concerns)

Re: Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button

#14

Post by jusrhee »

pil0u wrote: post #4

Hey thanks for sharing. You mention 3x cheaper than Heroku, but the pricing page specifies $10 per month GB RAM, $20 per month vCPU. I'm having a hard time to compare with Heroku with that information. Also, what about Postgres hosting?

Founder here - the "up to 3x cheaper than Heroku" depends on the exact compute profile, but as a point of reference, Heroku pricing starts at $250/mo for a single 2.5 GB RAM instance on their Performance tier (https://www.heroku.com/dynos). Generously assuming that you get 2 dedicated vCPU cores, the equivalent Porter cost is ~3-4x cheaper

Edit: Porter Cloud also supports Postgres and our in-your-own-cloud offering just uses RDS under the hood for AWS

Re: Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button

#16

Post by malyk »

At HomeLight we migrated from Heroku to Porter and it has been great. The team has been super helpful, the platform as stable as you can get, and the cost savings have been tremendous.

I’d highly recommend Porter as the place to go to get started these days. I don’t see any reason that we will migrate away in the next few years, if ever.

Re: Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button

#17

Post by jusrhee »

mushufasa wrote: post #12
mushufasa wrote: post #5

I looked into porter at the time we were migrating from Heroku to AWS! I thought it would have been a great solution if it was mature when we first started on heroku. At this point, I have to ask: what's your business model? The reason heroku never made it easy to migrate is the incentive you point out. What's yours?

To wit, I ask because: 1. key to a buying decision: I see the documentation for Eject and it looks good, though like any product you'll only able to support it over time if it makes business sense for you 2. I'm interested in this challenge generally cross-industry for companies that sell 'get off the ground' services to startups, on a high margin usage-based model. It's a business model with a constant sword of Damo…

I'd like to reframe this a bit (Porter co-founder btw). The way we see it, the core value of many PaaS solutions is the reduction of DevOps overhead by allowing teams to focus engineering resources on product and not generic infra maintenance tasks.

Most of our existing users are companies that are already using Porter in their own AWS/GCP/Azure because they want to reduce time spent on cloud management as they continue to grow. Companies like Heroku exclusively provide this service in a hosted cloud environment where they also resell the underlying infrastructure to you (similar to Porter Cloud), but we want to be flexible in delivering the same value on any cloud provider.

If we're doing our job, we will continue to automate enough generic DevOps work where Porter is delivering value even as you scale in your own cloud. We have a good number of late-stage startups (and even some public companies) that have DevOps teams in place using us precisely this way to handle core parts of their infra and application lifecycle management.

Porter Cloud is intended as a way to "get off the ground," but our staying value lies in continuing to reduce the same DevOps overhead even once you're running in your own cloud account

Re: Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button

#18

Post by sungrokshim »

hahahacorn wrote: post #8

We migrated from Heroku to Porter at work (at my behest). Still one of the better bets I’ve taken. There is definitely still some more devops overhead compared to Heroku, and I wish the product was a bit more mature. But even at ~$18k/mo on Heroku spend we’re now spending less than half with Porter. Other than myself and the other engineer who were responsible for the migration, the rest of the team really got to kee…

Great to hear that!

> I’ll work with them again if I ever scale past a $10k/mo Heroku bill (post enterprise contract) with another team.

We built Porter Cloud so you can just start on us from day 1 and migrate to the Porter you're used to when you're ready, without spending much effort on the migration :)

Re: Show HN: Porter Cloud – PaaS with an eject button

#19

Post by sungrokshim »

davedx wrote: post #7

It's a great idea, but the pricing seems high - $30/month minimum? I'm running 3 apps on Fly.io and I'm still so low in the pricing that they're invoicing me $0. I will pay for the convenience of a PaaS - but not that much.

not sure where you saw $30/month minimum! There's no minimum spend on Porter, and you just pay for what you use as low as a 0.1 CPU and 1MB RAM. We do not have a free tier however.
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