I choked at seeing the $250/mo. Heroku cost for a checklist app! Wow. You can set up a Linode VM or DigitalOcean droplet for $5 or $10 a month, run a few commands to get software installed and get it reasonably hardened against intrusion. Hardly takes any time at all.
And for that do you get a scalable app on managed servers with a wildcard SSL cert, backups, analytics, email, and a managed PostgreSQL instance?
I'm not a Heroku user, so I can't vouch for their service one way or the other, but they do provide a lot of value-add. The time it takes to set up and maintain those services by hand is not free. Unless you yourself are in the business of providing a service platform so that you can generate economies of scale, the time you would spend over the course of a year in maintaining backups and software updates and addressing zero-day security issues for your $10/month Linode would quickly add up to the $3000/year the Heroku services cost. And that's all assuming that you already understand all the sysadmin-level details that, let's face it, most developers don't have the time to keep up with. And honestly a full-time sysadmin can't keep up with everything for every subsystem. There's just too much.
The more I think about it, the better value Heroku appears to be.
How scalable does a simple checklist app need to be? Especially when that checklist app has next to no users?
I just don't think that managing your own SSL cert and backups are worth $250 a month for a tiny application that no one uses. Logging into your VPS once a month to install updates is beyond trivial. That might not be my strategy if I had hundreds of paying customers, but the author of the article didn't have hundreds of paying customers.
The moral of the story is that you should choose the right tool for the job. A $250/mo. Heroku app for a developer who wants to fiddle around with it for a tiny side project is not a good value as far as I'm concerned.
As much as I'd like to say my time is more valuable, honestly I'd rather save my $250/mo and built out a solution that's cheaper.
For the naysayers, my relatively small apps receive over 300k reqs/day and it's hosted on a much, much cheaper infrastructure. Just remember to cache things where appropriate and you'd be surprised how much $30-40 in server costs can take you.
Adding an unnecessary $200/month to your burn rate is silly, but if it'll kill your business then there isn't a viable business model there in the first place.
He'd only have needed, say, 10 paying customers to cover his expensive hosting. The fact he couldn't get those first 10 customers is why he failed, not the hosting costs.
Managing SSL, backups, and updates well and correctly take time. Not just the time to do them but the time to learn what needs to be done. A productive software developer is not one who worries about squeezing every dollar out of her service providers. If you already know how to handle all the other services or enjoy learning, go for it. But for some people it's best to focus on what you enjoy and are good at, and outsource the rest.
I agree that if this app is just a hobby, it's not worth having all the extra services. But given the services provided, $250/month, when weighed against a good software developer's time, is a good value.
> The more I think about it, the better value Heroku appears to be.
Not really.
Netlify for $9/mo to serve static content over Akamai's network. API Gateway + Lambda + Dynamo for pennies per month when your traffic is low. If you get linked to by HN or some other source of massive traffic, you may pay ~$100 or so, but it will scale up (and back down) with no extra effort.
This setup is basically the same price as the $10/mo Linode for most side projects and will outperform the $250/mo Heroku setup.
He had... at its maximum 13,000 people on the service at a single time from an HN post. Most of these people just touched the landing page and bounced away. Any VPS should be able to handle that since its static traffic.
At its height, 600 people were daily active users (at a most generous estimate). Unless those 600 people were all active at the same time of day, you'd be able to handle it easily.
People underestimate what good caching can give you. I had an application that would only be able to handle 20/req/second without caching. With aggressive caching, it could handle 2100/req/second so long as that was all reads; and that was true. It handled 40,000 people a day with the $49 dedicated server hovering at 2% utilization in CPU for Postgres, Elasticsearch, Redis, Nginx, and Django Python.
> the time you would spend over the course of a year in maintaining backups and software updates and addressing zero-day security issues
Backups are a once and forget it style process. A simple cronjob can backup to another disk or upload to S3.
Zero-day security issues? They're handled by a managed server host. All kernel level updates are.
> Zero-day security issues? They're handled by a managed server host. All kernel level updates are.
And that is how much per month? A quick check with a well known company shows £350/mo. That sounds expensive, but on the other hand I'm not sure I would be leaving my security in hands of a $10/mo shop :)
Kernel updates really ought to be an automated process at any company. At that point it doesn't really matter if you have 3 servers going for $350 or 49 servers going for $50 a pop.
Yes, but you're not paying someone to just type "apt-get install"; you're paying someone to [1] avoid eventual mess as a result of that and [2] fast recovery if shit hits the fan.
In other words, you don't pay them so much for what they do every day, but for what you don't really hope never happens.
Yikes. Or break all that down and get it all for free elsewhere. For a mechanical engineer that doesn't know much about doing this on their own, I suppose it's not a raw deal. I think lots of people make this argument about all those other services "not being free" and while that's true, that seems more to me an excuse for not having learned how to do those things quickly. I can set all that stuff up in a very short amount of time. My cost for doing that is almost nothing. The barrier to entry for that kind of thing goes down extremely quickly, in fact, I'd say the cost is only "high" the first time you do it. Every time after that it costs much, much less.
So did I. He had waaaaay too many things. I have an app running on Heroku that handles his peak traffic, daily, for just $16. The only difference between mine and his is the SSL add-on...but that's $20.
He loaded up too many things.
1 web dyno, the free Heroku Dev DB, SendGrid free starter plan, Google Analytics, and the SSL would run him about $27 ($20 for SSL and $7 for 1 paid Web Dyno so the app doesn't go down every 16 hours).
That's all he needs. $250/mo is OVERKILL that he doesn't need.
Pretty sure this is not a Heroku issue.
P.S. As others have pointed out, this is a simple checklist app. He doesn't even need the SSL add-on until he verifies this is something people will pay for. It's not that serious bro. People can login with their personal info over a normal HTTP connection for now.
