This is great, I'd love to see more companies/projects do this. Maybe http://usesthis.com could have a company edition.
Running costs for running a web app
201–210 of 225 posts
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
One can get 15 free accounts in Zoho (10 de-facto + 5 extra), if you can refer another business. Both parties get 5 extra users. Helpful for info@, jobs@, privacy@ etc.
> Helpful for info@, jobs@, privacy@ etc. I don't know about Zoho, but in case of Google Apps, they allow you a configuration to route all mail through a host of yours which would allow you to create these aliases without having to pay for actual accounts. At lest that's what I'm doing at our place. All mail to our domain goes to our MX which does alias expansion and then forwards is to Google Apps (after making a ba…
Zoho also has that kinda service. All mails to accounts that don't exist go to the primary admin's account.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
One can get 15 free accounts in Zoho (10 de-facto + 5 extra), if you can refer another business. Both parties get 5 extra users. Helpful for info@, jobs@, privacy@ etc.
> Helpful for info@, jobs@, privacy@ etc. I don't know about Zoho, but in case of Google Apps, they allow you a configuration to route all mail through a host of yours which would allow you to create these aliases without having to pay for actual accounts. At lest that's what I'm doing at our place. All mail to our domain goes to our MX which does alias expansion and then forwards is to Google Apps (after making a ba…
Google Apps allows you to create groups for free, or you can alias individual mailboxes (if you're okay with thing@ going to just one person). No need to run through your own middlebox. You do need to make sure that external people can send to the given group, though.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#204Running 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 fo…
I have to strongly disagree with you. I run my own online thing and find that keeping expenses down has given me a huge competitive advantage over similar sites. I would also stress that there are other reasons to keep complexity down, like hating to do paperwork (or work of any kind).
Ha, I totally hear you on the second one. There are a number of situations where I've chosen to do something in-house rather than using one of these vendors, partially because I prefer to spend time managing the technical solution over (admittedly much less time :) ) handling the paperwork of one more vendor.
Of course, it's also just my natural inclination. My common response to problems is more along the lines of, "I can write a script to do this," than, "I bet there's a SaaS for this." That may well be inefficient, but it's how I roll.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#205And here I am, running 7 sites on my $15/year VPS box. Yup, just $1.25/month, and the sites generate a few hundred a month th.
If I moved to Heroku or AWS, my profits would definitely suffer.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Please do. I look forward to reading about the channels.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#207People are talking about the cost of Heroku, but it doesn't seem that outrageous to me. I mean, $180/month for a running app, that is making money, isn't that much. Once the traffic grows, and you're spending $500 or $1000 per month, yes, it becomes worth it to look into alternatives (because $1000 on Heroku can probably be replaced by $150-200 on more powerful hardware). But moving from Heroku to a less managed opti…
Heroku is not 100% management-free, and if you know how to deploy the same infrastructure they provide, using VMs, dedicated servers and whatever, then there is little reason to use them at all. You get better flexibility, lower costs and very little more management requirements over what you get at Heroku.
Of course if you don't know how to do that, then you pay them to do it for you, until you can hire someone to do it on your own.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#208Running 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 fo…
I have to strongly disagree with you. I run my own online thing and find that keeping expenses down has given me a huge competitive advantage over similar sites. I would also stress that there are other reasons to keep complexity down, like hating to do paperwork (or work of any kind).
The peak spending in the graph is about $1300 for the month. This is barely more than one single employee's salary if they're on the US federal minimum wage ($7.25 x 40 hours x 4 weeks = $1160), and that's before you have to pay the employee overheads. It then settles down to around half this amount.
For a company with multiple employees, this really is peanuts. If you can do better, that's great, but it's not the standard experience in business.
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#209This is great, I'd love to see more companies/projects do this. Maybe http://usesthis.com could have a company edition.
Stackshare does this. Here is SeatGeek's stack: http://stackshare.io/seatgeek
Re: Running costs for running a web app
#210And here I am, running 7 sites on my $15/year VPS box. Yup, just $1.25/month, and the sites generate a few hundred a month th. If I moved to Heroku or AWS, my profits would definitely suffer.
According to their Stripe data, they're making between $2560 and $4700 a month with around 200 users.
If your VPS box could handle that... they might still have a better business model.