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Running costs for running a web app

cushionapp.com

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Re: Running costs for running a web app

#121

Post by grapehut »

icebraining wrote: post #63
arikrak wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can get free SSL from CloudFlare and connect it with the free SSL option at https://yourApp.herokuapp.com . (That's what I use at https://www.learneroo.com )

The only potential problem is that Cloudflare doesn't check the validity of the herokuapp.com cert, so in theory someone could MITM the connection. In practice, I'm not sure how you'd even get Cloudflare to connect to the rogue proxy, short of taking control of the DNS of *.herokuapp.com.

That's not true, when you setup crypto in cloudflare you need pick between "Full SSL (Strict)" which requires a valid certificate, and "Full SSL (non-strict)" which allows you to use a self-signed certificate or what not, but there's no reason you should be using that mode if you already have a valid certificate (as is the heroku case).

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#122

Post by dwightgunning »

dominotw wrote: post #65

> Continuous Delivery Codeship free I had no idea they were free.

One of my initial thoughts was that this list gives an interesting pricing signal to the various services that are shown.

It's interesting to consider whether certain services are pricing for perceived value and what the market will bare, or under-pricing for acquisition in an immature market and going for the land grab, or just underpricing themselves.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#123

Post by destroytoday »

brad0 wrote: post #111
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 p…

Correct—the font licenses were a one-time cost. Previously, I was using Typekit, but I hit an issue with the requests stalling for ~3 seconds. Apparently, Chrome has a threshold of not loading more than ~5 requests from a single external location at once, which resulted in the stall. I reached out to the font foundries and they were incredibly helpful in letting me try out the fonts for performance testing. When loaded from my own CDN, they loaded instantly. At the time, I had some extra cash from a freelance gig I just wrapped up, so I went for the font licenses. To me, as the designer/developer/one-man-team, it was important to have design I intended for Cushion along with good performance—and supporting the font designers who were so helpful.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#124

Post by mtolan »

Thanks for posting this, I found the format incredibly helpful, and it kind of makes me want to produce a run-rate estimator in a similar format. I often wind up overspending on side-project ideas for failing to take into account the costs of services I'll wind up using.

Judging by the Stripe fees, I'd hazard that your cumulative revenue is in the $30k range. I'm sure there are marketing and advertising expenses that aren't listed here, but that seems like a pretty healthy gross margin.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#125

Post by destroytoday »

codezero wrote: post #103

It 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.

For Cushion, I use Intercom to handle support, in-app feature updates, newsletter emails, user tracking (tagging to follow up with feature updates), automated emails (trial expiring, etc), and a slew of other things. When I added the cost of that up across other services, it ended up costing more than I'd pay with Intercom. Also, I really love Intercom and their team—they're doing great work. Trying to handle support via email would be a nightmare from simply an organizational standpoint—I tried it for a very short period of time.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#126

Post by sleepyhead »

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…

How much time would it take to code a carousel? How long time does it take to look through the countless open source carousels? How likely is it that this $25 carousel is better than the free ones? Come on, it's peanuts if it's a good lib even though it's a fairly standard feature.

I would off course never use a carousel though.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#127

Post by destroytoday »

philipn wrote: post #68

Thanks for sharing this! Why not include the cost of your time to maintain and improve the service? Without including the cost of your own time it seems hard to make budget decisions (e.g. the tradeoff between a PaaS and using a provisioned VPS). Even if you're not paying yourself anything, it seems important to include what you could be making if you were doing something else with your time.

I definitely plan to share the cost of my time to work on Cushion. I've been tracking my time since the original idea. To give you an idea, I just crossed 2,000 hours for design and development. I didn't track time for customer support and writing, but it's up there. If I were to charge hourly for all my time spent on this app, I'd be sitting pretty. :)

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#128

Post by codinghorror »

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.

It also performed a lot better, if that helps. Granted for some orgs, even a $10k per month hosting bill might be no big deal. But we package Discourse for usage, and generally speaking less expensive means more people using it.

There is a point of diminishing returns, of course, pushing down to $5/month is a lot of pain -- super low cost super low resource hosting, etc.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#129

Post by destroytoday »

funkyy wrote: post #81
destroytoday wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a solo dev. :) I use Slack as a notification center for all of my services.

How your setup works then? Sounds like something that could improve performance of single dev.

I definitely plan to write about it on the journal (http://cushionapp.com/journal). I have channels for new users, Stripe charges/subscriptions, errors from Sentry, build notifications, and support notifications. I plan to also build some Slack bots that would help automate a few things.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#130

Post by codezero »

destroytoday wrote: post #125
codezero wrote: post #103

It 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.

For Cushion, I use Intercom to handle support, in-app feature updates, newsletter emails, user tracking (tagging to follow up with feature updates), automated emails (trial expiring, etc), and a slew of other things. When I added the cost of that up across other services, it ended up costing more than I'd pay with Intercom. Also, I really love Intercom and their team—they're doing great work. Trying to handle support…

Awesome. I hear lots of great things about intercom so I wanted to see how people thought of the cost.
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