This seems ok given that the startup has generated approximately $60,000 in stripe revenue. I would try to reduce costs in those Heroku workers... $175/month seems steep.
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Running costs for running a web app
101–110 of 225 posts
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't get an engineer in my model: you usually share one with others. Someone who throws together this stuff all the time usually has premade images, scripts, checklists, etc that make it very efficient. You become one of their many customers. This might be a person or a firm. It's just one that focuses on great cost-benefit as differentiator. So, one $30-50k engineer gets split 5-10 ways on infrastructure. Most…
This doesn't take into account the following transactions: - The time and money it takes to find said $30-50k engineer - The risk (and therefore potential cost) if the engineer doesn't do the job correctly - The unknown cost of "occasionally fixing" could be $50 or $50,000. Given how nebolus the DevOps position is, you also can't be sure the stuff this individual is doing is considered best practice. - There is overh…
I like when people lay out all the obstacles people would face because I think the probability of creating an solution to this is > 0 and higher when people question models.
But this one i would like to ask some questions about:
"The unknown cost of "occasionally fixing" could be $50 or $50,000. Given how nebolus the DevOps position is, you also can't be sure the stuff this individual is doing is considered best practice."
Who gets to decide what's best practice? How does such information about such best practice propagate? How much does it cost to acquire such best practice knowledge? Is trying to mitigate for this all the time a theoretical constraint on all possible solutions (i.e. without trying to mitigate for this, things will not work at all) or for any of the issues you bring up that are probably valid assumptions for some set of solutions?
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#103It looks like Intercom is one of the most costly monthly services. I think support is of huge importance, but I'm curious how you justified to yourself that it was worth the cost to use Intercom over, say, email.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#104This is the first time I have ever heard of Papertrail. I really hate loggly and am looking for a better option - can anyone shed any light on if this is a good option ? Which log aggregation services is everyone using ?
I also had a terrible experience with loggly. Been using logentries since with zero complaints
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#105It costs $5/month to run Sublevel using DigitalOcean plus 21$/year for domain and SSL certificate.
One sure can have a DO droplet for a minimal rate, but unlike Heroku/AWS, they don't offer anything oriented to high availabilty, resilience, auto-scaling, performance (via workers), etc.
Exactly. In addition to what you listed, the ability to quickly roll-back to previous releases with a single click on Heroku has literally saved me from losing paying customers. I don't know what I would have done this past week where I had to do just that after a bad release.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dividing your architecture into separate components is not only needed for operating at scale (the "nice" problem to have), but for having high availability (or even decent performance) at all. Depending on one's business, HA/performance may not matter that much, but personally my startup is having a 'proper' design from day 1 - downtime is not acceptable for my business model.
Dividing your architecture into separate components will probably cause you more downtime and have much worse performance. Less servers and components mean less things to break. Grab a dedicated server and host your shit on it (have a DB replica because losing data sucks, but that is easy). You will be able to run like that for much longer than you probably suspect and the chance of downtime will be massively reduced…
Workers are a must for any minimally sophisticated web application. You cannot degrade HTTP response time (and whole app server performance) just because you are performing work synchronously before the request finishes.
Similarly, if the work you are performing has any value for your business, it must be retryable, and the queued items must be safely stored (i.e. don't use a single Redis server - use something distributed like SQS instead).
All of that calls for a 'proper' architecture. I'm not talking microservices or anything fancy - just a webapp/worker/db separation and the like. Which is exactly what dedicated server (or DigitalOcean) users tend to lack at early stages.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't get an engineer in my model: you usually share one with others. Someone who throws together this stuff all the time usually has premade images, scripts, checklists, etc that make it very efficient. You become one of their many customers. This might be a person or a firm. It's just one that focuses on great cost-benefit as differentiator. So, one $30-50k engineer gets split 5-10 ways on infrastructure. Most…
This doesn't take into account the following transactions: - The time and money it takes to find said $30-50k engineer - The risk (and therefore potential cost) if the engineer doesn't do the job correctly - The unknown cost of "occasionally fixing" could be $50 or $50,000. Given how nebolus the DevOps position is, you also can't be sure the stuff this individual is doing is considered best practice. - There is overh…
The alternative doesn't take into account:
- The time and money it takes to find and evaluate providers like Heroku
- The risk (and therefore potential cost) if the SaaS solution doesn't handle your needs as advertised
- Unknown costs that crop up both in paying the provider and handling stuff outside the provider.
- Overhead spent managing cloud applications
- Potential that local Internet or cloud startup experiences downtime.
There's a reason dedicated IT people exist and have been successful, and these are just a few of them.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#108I always find breakdowns like this interesting. Just to get a feel for what others are using, their reasoning, and to generalize what others are spending monthly/annually. With more breakdowns like this from more companies, I think it provides a great understanding of costs. It also can give people a good baseline for understanding what costs are at certain levels of users and with certain functionality. While I unde…
If you assume that all users are paying monthly (not unreasonable, the $2/month savings are tiny vs getting locked into $96/yr), then they only have about 600 users since they're charging each of them once a month (hence the 7k billing events).
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#109Am I understanding this correctly? Just under 10% of the cost was spent on fonts? $~800? That seems unbelievably high.
Yeah, fonts are expensive, and I wouldn't go near a free font I found on the web unless it was hosted by someone like Google. So if you don't like any of Google's free font options, you gotta pay.
Also, there is no cost for a designer in the pricing, so either that is a startup cost not included in the ongoing pricing, or is done in house. And a designer is not cheap.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
The bill looks huge. You can get SSL for like $8/year from reseller for one of the Symantec ones. I think that starting startup can cut a lot of corners by using open source resources and cheap cloud servers like DO.
You can get SSL for free: https://letsencrypt.org/
As of Dec 2015, and the app beta started in Sep 2014.