81–90 of 225 posts
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.
I really dont understand. Im deploy rails webapps all the time with pretty large postgres backends. You could totally spin up multiple digital ocean instances to get a much cheaper infrastructure. I usually use one for load balancing, 2+ for running the app, and usually one for the backend postgres. You could also get away with using something other than digital ocean for the postgres. But for 6000 users, depending o…
The other expenses appear to be various other services (slack, support site, logging service, etc). Lot's of 3rd part services to handle stuff.
Obviously it's a lot cheaper if you can do many of these things yourself (run your own support web app, use a free chat service, etc, etc). But we all have to decide what services we want to pay for vs run ourselves - in some cases it is cheaper to not have to spend the time!
Seeing lots of comments about cost of Heroku. An easy way to get that down is to not use Ruby.
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 option just to save $80/month doesn't seem particularly worth it.
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…
By the way, your use of Heroku makes total sense given that you're basically alone, I hope that the lock-in won't be too difficult to overcome when moving away from it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe if you hire them from Silicon Valley. There's plenty of skilled people in areas with low cost of living that can handle the job without 10x the pay of whoever. There should be at least one such person on the team anyway if the business is a web application . Plus, aren't there alternatives to services like Heroku these days that come as appliances or VM's with simple deployment? I'm seriously asking because I d…
For JVM apps Boxfuse ( https://boxfuse.com ) gives you dead-easy deployment to plain AWS by generating minimal VM images that run unchanged both locally on VirtualBox and in the cloud. It follows the principles of immutable infrastructure (machines are disposable and never modified) and all updates are performed as zero-downtime blue/green deployments.
http://www.aonix.com/pdf/PercDatasheet.pdf
They run POSIX and safety-critical apps side-by-side on a microkernel (eg QNX, INTEGRITY) w/ latter usually on a built-for-purpose runtime like PERC. They also would combine app, dependencies, and runtime into one image that could go into a ROM. Services like Boxfuse are doing it for cloud but the model goes back over a decade with proven benefit. Goes back further in security kernels (eg Aesec's GEMSOS or BAE's XTS-400) where they did same thing for preventing sensitive components from leaking to ported POSIX/Linux apps. So, it goes back almost three decades now. That's how long it takes industry to learn apparently. ;)
EDIT: Wait, you're the founder rather than just a user. You might have heard of some of this advanced, clever Java stuff already then. Haha.
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…
People 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…
Am I understanding this correctly? Just under 10% of the cost was spent on fonts? $~800? That seems unbelievably high.