Running costs for running a web app • Hacker News Board

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#111

Post by brad0 » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 8:17 PM UTC

ejcx wrote: post #39

Am I understanding this correctly? Just under 10% of the cost was spent on fonts? $~800? That seems unbelievably high.

It's a one time cost. The others are monthly costs. Most likely they're paying for a redistributable licence which is much more expensive than other licences.

For instance, take a look at this font I'm currently integrating into the app I'm working on:

https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/intelligent-foundry/averta/ https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/intelligent-foundry/averta/buy...

If you want to put these on the web, you're paying $200 per font type. If you want to buy the whole family, that's almost $1200.

Companies with a design focus are happy to pay this in order to differentiate themselves from others.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#112

Post by smackfu » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 8:18 PM UTC

kungfooguru wrote: post #55

Seeing lots of comments about cost of Heroku. An easy way to get that down is to not use Ruby.

So just rewrite the app?

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#113

Post by bengarvey » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 8:20 PM UTC

codinghorror wrote: post #21

Heroku is very, very expensive. We switched an early Discourse setup from Heroku to Digital Ocean (using our Docker setup, which is another reason why it exists) and it saved them probably $100 per month. Everything but the largest communities fit fine on a $20/month, 2 CPU, 2GB ram DO droplet.

"Heroku is very, very expensive." "saved them probably $100 per month"

I'm confused.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#114

Post by vonklaus » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 8:21 PM UTC

minouye wrote: post #93

These "Heroku is too expensive" comments all look at absolute costs and not relative costs. They are paying roughly $200 a month to Heroku. If you do some rough calculations to figure out revenue (use Stripe fees and make assumptions about yearly/monthly plan breakdown) you can reasonably estimate about $3,000 in monthly billings. The incremental savings couldn't possibly outweigh the time costs of switching to anoth…

I used to say "but we could just build that", but I agree with you.

Some of the things I find expensive are te SSL line items and more peculiar than expensive really, a $25 image carousel.

If letsencrypt could be a drop in replacement for te SSL spend it would save them some money.

Other than that, I don't use Heroku, but not wanted to manage a db is pretty reasonable and the cost offset is likely there.

Sometimes these startups are 2 people. So the tech cycle would be hard enough, not to mention business and customer support.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#115

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 8:27 PM UTC

jggonz wrote: post #6

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.

[deleted]

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#116

Post by lotyrin » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 8:40 PM UTC

mod wrote: post #75

thedevil wrote: post #71

Anyone here have any thoughts on AppEngine vs Heroku? I use AppEngine for my experimental projects because I can get a simple data model and some handlers running in minutes and a (supposedly automatically scalable) useful backend up in less than a day, and at very low cost. (Virtually free if I use an *.appspot.com domain). You do get lockin issues but don't you also get lockin from Heroku? Is there big advantages t…

I haven't used AppEngine, but getting a heroku instance up takes less than an hour. If I did it more often, I'd think it could be done for a typical CRUD app in An instance on DigitalOcean would be more like 2 hours. There's no lockin that I've experienced on Heroku.

The case I've always experienced, which is "; heroku create; git push heroku master" is a few seconds.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#117

Post by yeasayer » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 9:15 PM UTC

misiti3780 wrote: post #57

This 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'm using Papertrail and the experience so far is not so great. Dashboard UI looks like it wasn't updated since 2005. Also, the free plan is a joke: 10Mb of logs per day. When I started I managed to stay under this quota, but recently I've added a couple features that spits additional log data. Now I have to either filter some valuable logs or become a paying customer (which I can't afford for such thing as logging).

Looking to migrate to https://logentries.com At least their free plan offers 5Gb/month.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#118

Post by brandonmenc » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 9:17 PM UTC

bengarvey wrote: post #113

codinghorror wrote: post #21

Heroku is very, very expensive. We switched an early Discourse setup from Heroku to Digital Ocean (using our Docker setup, which is another reason why it exists) and it saved them probably $100 per month. Everything but the largest communities fit fine on a $20/month, 2 CPU, 2GB ram DO droplet.

"Heroku is very, very expensive." "saved them probably $100 per month" I'm confused.

This pretty much sums up the entire thread.

No one is understanding that having a few extra hours a month to build features and find customers is worth a couple hundred bucks. It's probably worth thousands of dollars a month.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#119

Post by AznHisoka » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 9:20 PM UTC

tylermauthe wrote: post #33

As some have said, this seems expensive. However, I would point out that the costs of using Heroku should be outweighed by the convenience and ability to focus on features. You are getting what you pay for here, the velocity you gain from not worrying about your infrastructure. I do think that when you are first launching a startup, you should probably do everything as cheaply as possible, which probably means using…

"As soon as your infrastructure becomes more complicated, you can use Heroku instead of hiring people to manage it for a while"

Having a Iaas/Paas doesn't mean you don't have to manage anything - that's a myth. Sure, it might be doable if you own a trivial app with just 1 web server + 1 app server + 1 database server. But once you're doing anything remotely complex like building a 10-node Elasticsearch cluster that is running out of RAM, or a 10 Cassanda node cluster, or a Kafka queue that can overfill, you always need an engineer to manage your infrastructure.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#120

Post by destroytoday » Sun, Jan 10, 2016, 9:25 PM UTC

vonklaus wrote: post #114

minouye wrote: post #93

These "Heroku is too expensive" comments all look at absolute costs and not relative costs. They are paying roughly $200 a month to Heroku. If you do some rough calculations to figure out revenue (use Stripe fees and make assumptions about yearly/monthly plan breakdown) you can reasonably estimate about $3,000 in monthly billings. The incremental savings couldn't possibly outweigh the time costs of switching to anoth…

I used to say "but we could just build that", but I agree with you. Some of the things I find expensive are te SSL line items and more peculiar than expensive really, a $25 image carousel. If letsencrypt could be a drop in replacement for te SSL spend it would save them some money. Other than that, I don't use Heroku, but not wanted to manage a db is pretty reasonable and the cost offset is likely there. Sometimes th…

For some insight, the $25 carousel was more about supporting the indie dev who built it. :) And sometimes the startup is 1 person, which Cushion currently is. I'm hoping to hire some dev help this year, though!