How is sentry free if he uses Heroku for everything? It must be running somewhere else like AWS or DO right? But those aren't listed as part of his costs.
Running costs for running a web app
161–170 of 225 posts
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#162I run my personal website on a junk desktop I got from free from a previous employer. I only pay for the domain name and have a measured 99% uptime.
This is to say: a shopping list like that is utterly meaningless without the context of what the service architecture trying to achieve.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#163Heroku 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.
We you running Sidekiq? If so, was it able to run on the same droplet?
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#164I 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).
It's a 20% discount for a time/budget management/forecast solution that I don't think makes much sense to stop using every other month -- so I'd be surprised if most that go from free trail don't convert to yearly subscription? (They could of course have 600 different users each month, and be failing due to big churn with their customers...)
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#165Re: Running costs for running a web app
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree and would add that it's easy to look at their spend and think that's a waste, but I think with many endeavors, an individual's time is usually the scarcest resource. Web services expenses aren't even close to their cost of adding an additional employee to solve these problems in-house. Learning to automate something a more seasoned *NIX veteran could do in an hour is not always a predictable time expense, and…
That's a good point about individual's time being a resource. There are many things I am good at and there are many things I am not so good at. I would gladly pay a premium to a service to have them handle the things I am not good at, especially when just in the startup phase. So while one person may think that saving a buck here is an option, for me that buck may be the difference between being able to continue busi…
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Re: Running costs for running a web app
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their total costs between Heroku and Redis infrastructure are less than $3000. I don't think you'd be able to hire a devops engineer for less than $30k, anywhere. It's surprising to me that people think they're spending a lot on infrastructure when they spend $800 on fonts, etc. When you drop the payment processor charges (which are per transaction) they're at $7k to run a site with a lot of functionality for a year.…
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…
I'm curious - do you have first hand experience with companies that does this (and does it well)? I might want to work (at first part time, remote) for such an outfit, if I they provide a good service (and good/skilful colleagues).
I've seen a lot of people that hire devops in-house (technically, it's a little hard to see how "devops" might work with the "ops"-person just doing drive-by installation and maintenance once every month -- but I suppose if the "dev" part isn't "special" (web application server + database + static resources + database) one could argue there's not much need for "devops", just "ops"?).
Although 30k for full-time ops works sounds really low, anywhere? (As a customer, I'd probably prefer one tenth of a 100k/year engineer than one tenth of a 30k/year engineer... even if the price might be 3-4 times as high).
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their total costs between Heroku and Redis infrastructure are less than $3000. I don't think you'd be able to hire a devops engineer for less than $30k, anywhere. It's surprising to me that people think they're spending a lot on infrastructure when they spend $800 on fonts, etc. When you drop the payment processor charges (which are per transaction) they're at $7k to run a site with a lot of functionality for a year.…
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…
Out of curiosity, can you name some of these firms that contract out these kinds of engineers?
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#169Running a business is much, much more expensive than you'd expect if you've never done it before. I started one on $60 so I get the mindset which has people suggesting that this story represents prolifigate spending, but oh my goodness, it's practically a shoestring.
There is an individual thing in the AR deployment which exists for no technical purpose to get us a piece of paper issued by Rackspace which we need for legal reasons. That thing costs more than everything on this page combined. We have one part-time employee; she's 3X more expensive than that thing.
If you're put off by $80 for a database wait until you get quoted rent, insurance, taxes, accounting fees, any engagement with a professional, review of a customer's MSA to sell them an enterprise contract, healthcare for a single person, travel to a single conference, the wifi at the hotel for a single conference, etc etc.
Also: there is virtually no scenario under which a SaaS app grossing $Xk per month has a better financial or technical outcome by working on minimizing expenses when you could be working on selling more accounts and selling better accounts.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#170At our agency we tend to have a lot of low budget projects, plus we like to keep expenses low if there's a relatively small overhead in return. For saving on costs we use: - Bitbucket over Github (Private repos are free, although Github has more features, so it depends on how much you use really) - Email Hosting Zoho over Google (FREE): We tend to recommend Zoho to single entrepreneurs since it offers 10 accounts for…
+1 for LetsEncrypt. Really great, and if your using DO their is already a tutorial for it.
Completely free SSL Certificate. 'Nuff said.