31–40 of 225 posts
Heroku is without a doubt one of the more expensive options out there. SSL being billed per month? Yikes. SSL really should be standard.
I migrated from Heroku to OpsWorks a year ago and couldn't be happier.
While I understand that these numbers also give an opportunity for people to point out areas where there may be potential cost savings or opportunities to improve infrastructure, I am not sure generic comments of saying you are spending too much or too little, or I don't spend that much are beneficial. A few key pieces of information that would help correlate these numbers in my opinion are total users on each plan, monthly active users, and the average amount of data required for the users.
Just based off the Stripe numbers I would estimate that they have between 6000-7000 annual paying users (this number may actually be a little lower if the majority of users are paying monthly instead of annually). That does not include members that only trial the service, although I would suspect this number is small.
Long story short, every business has different requirements and usage. What works for one company with 6000 users may not work great for the another company with 6000 users. I just hate seeing people say that someone is spending too much without knowing all the details.
I do think that when you are first launching a startup, you should probably do everything as cheaply as possible, which probably means using a VPS or IaaS. As soon as your infrastructure becomes more complicated, you can use Heroku instead of hiring people to manage it for a while. Then see where your growth takes you -- you will probably find that eventually it makes more sense to hire a couple people to manage some IaaS or even renting racks and buying hardware.
As with all things in life, it really depends. I believe this particular configuration makes sense for companies who want to focus on product, not infrastructure -- at a cost of expensive hosting.
What are the strikethroughs for? My assumption is thing you aren't paying for anymore, but wanted to double check since not all have replacements.
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.
This is an excellent breakdown, thanks. As others have pointed out you can make it cheaper here or there but I find it awesome that you can run your business without any dedicated IT resources a sysadmin/network/ops kind of person. Adding one employee might switch it from a nice side income to losing money.
Heroku is without a doubt one of the more expensive options out there. SSL being billed per month? Yikes. SSL really should be standard.
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.
Hi! I run Cushion. Moving off Heroku is definitely high on my to-do list. So far, since I'm a solo dev, I've taken the mindset of paying for convenience services that would allow me to spend more time working on the app. Now, I'm getting into the phase where I can start reducing these costs and transition to a system that doesn’t induce fear when I need to add another server. Right now, I have two web workers and two…
I can slash about 4000 of those dollars down to 600 by renting hardware to run those services on. Makes you responsible for your setup but if you are bootstrapping, you can find better first year uses for 3400 dollars I'm sure.
At the time, I was eager to build the app and focus on its features and getting it online. I don't know much about renting hardware, setting up a system, and scaling, so I was gladly willing to pay to make that easier on myself. The $3400 lost actually bought me a lot more of my own time, which I consider more valuable in the long run. I'd be interested in reading a blog post about how you'd slash the cost, if you ev…
Heroku is without a doubt one of the more expensive options out there. SSL being billed per month? Yikes. SSL really should be standard.