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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

#131

Post by destroytoday »

nacs wrote: post #58

From the expense report, it says you have a wildcard SSL (and it seems to be in use in the subdomain for the signup page for example) yet your main root site seems to be unavailable via SSL? Is there any reason for this or just an oversight?

The marketing site is static-hosted on S3 and I think when I first set that up it was either too expensive for SSL or not possible. I'm not 100% sure, but I'll definitely look into it again. The wildcard SSL was a recent addition after coming out of beta, which didn't have the multiple subdomains.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#132

Post by bpicolo »

AznHisoka wrote: post #119
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 i…

Wouldn't call that true. There are hosted solutions for ES, Cass, and AWS has kafka alternatives. That's not to say no enginenering time will be spent, but certainly you can start without a full time infrastructure guy

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#133

Post by destroytoday »

djm_ wrote: post #34
destroytoday wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strikethroughs are for services I once used, but have since cancelled because I either moved to another service or no longer needed that service anymore. Early on, I paid for Code Climate, but realized it was an expensive non-necessity at the time. For services like Mailchimp, I moved my newsletter to Intercom once the spiked cost of Mailchimp didn't make sense to keep.

How about Baremetrics? What did you replace it with or was it not necessary?

The decision to cancel Baremetrics is a long story, but the main reason is that I don't agree with a few tactics they've used to improve MRR, like removing the ability for users to cancel their account on their own (you now need to email them). I'd rather make a little less in order to improve the user experience and build a better relationship with users. I use ChartMogul now, which I really enjoy using.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#134

Post by NeutronBoy »

destroytoday wrote: post #131
nacs wrote: post #58

From the expense report, it says you have a wildcard SSL (and it seems to be in use in the subdomain for the signup page for example) yet your main root site seems to be unavailable via SSL? Is there any reason for this or just an oversight?

The marketing site is static-hosted on S3 and I think when I first set that up it was either too expensive for SSL or not possible. I'm not 100% sure, but I'll definitely look into it again. The wildcard SSL was a recent addition after coming out of beta, which didn't have the multiple subdomains.

Hot tip for when you get around to setting it up - SSL on S3 is far easier if you use CloudFront as the endpoint. At least it was 6 months ago when I was playing around.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#136

Post by grumblestumble »

destroytoday wrote: post #16
lihorne wrote: post #12

How do you only pay $80 for Slack a year? Their base price is $6.67 / user / month on an annual plan, so $80 gets you 1 user on Slack. Huh?

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

If that's all you're using it for, you'd be better of with Hipchat, which serves as a functional notification channel and from what I recall is free for <10 users. I guess Slack would be worthwhile if you're using it for multiple projects, though.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#137

Post by terrabakky »

destroytoday wrote: post #123
brad0 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 load…

I think the limit for Chrome is a bit higher - 6 or so resources from the same location will cause the stall. You can usually see this happening if you watch the "Resources" tab in Chrome Dev Tools and watch the timings for loading each resource.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#138

Post by destroytoday »

codezero wrote: post #130
destroytoday wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, I mentioned to them that the cost was becoming a bit much for me as a solo dev, so they worked with me to build a custom plan that I could afford. I couldn't recommend Intercom enough.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#139

Post by icebraining »

grapehut wrote: post #121
icebraining wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

"Full SSL (Strict)" doesn't work with the certificate provided for free by Heroku:

  By default Heroku offers a wildcard SSL certificate which only covers
  ‘*.herokuapp.com’. This means that ‘Full SSL’ can be utilized as a default,
  which does not require that the SAN contains your FQDN. To utilize
  Full (Strict) you will need to add your own SSL certificate to your
  Heroku app, which can be done by using their ‘SSL Endpoint’ add-on.
https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/205893698-C...

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#140

Post by morgante »

I think this level of expense is totally acceptable and justified when you consider how expensive developer time is today. Even for someone fluent in operations, I'd argue it doesn't make sense to cost optimize until you're spending $1,000+ monthly.

In the entire lifetime of their service, they've spent $8,727.57. That's less than it would cost to hire me to optimize their infrastructure.

Even though I've worked on building cost-optimized and efficient deployments for other companies, for my own projects I first turn straight to Heroku. It requires substantial traffic for my opportunity cost to be justified: I'm typically much better off charging larger companies to tune their deployments than using the same skills to shave pennies off my bill.

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