14 ms·

Running costs for running a web app

• spoiledtechie 11y ago
  This is a lot of money. I am running my startup for less than $250.00 a month. This is all server costs. Without a doubt, this cost has increased over time, but in the beginning of the startup, it was just $20 or $30 a month. Ive built and home grown all of these products or at least what I needed in house. Shameless plug: https://rdnation.com https://rdnation.com and https://snation.com https://snation.com
  • crabasa 11y ago
    Unless you're paying less for the same line items, it's not really useful to say that you're running leaner. You might simply be using fewer tools.
    • destroytoday 11y ago
      I appreciate this.
  • Garvey 11y ago
    Just an FYI, on the snation.com site, WOT flags the page as Very Poor on Trustworthiness and Child Safety. The details of the WOT report make it seem like it could be an outdated report of spam/malware.
• daniel_levine 11y ago
  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.
  • zdrummond 11y ago
    I would also be curious on the rational of why you stopped using those services.
  • destroytoday 11y ago
    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.
    • djm_ 11y ago
      How about Baremetrics? What did you replace it with or was it not necessary?
      • destroytoday 11y ago
        The decision to cancel Baremetrics is a long story, but the main reason is that I don't agree with a few tactics they've used to improve MRR, like removing the ability for users to cancel their account on their own (you now need to email them). I'd rather make a little less in order to improve the user experience and build a better relationship with users. I use ChartMogul now, which I really enjoy using.
    • hackerboos 11y ago
      There is also https://sendy.co/ https://sendy.co/ which uses Amazon SES. It's a lot cheaper than mailchimp.
• jtchang 11y ago
  Heroku is without a doubt one of the more expensive options out there. SSL being billed per month? Yikes. SSL really should be standard.
  • jacques_chester 11y ago
    Heroku is enornmously featuresome and convenient. Simply not having to think about how to stage, locate and run an app saves a lot of visible and hidden engineering time. Source: I work for a company which donates engineering time to what is, in some respects, a Heroku competitor (Cloud Foundry).
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  • kyleblarson 11y ago
    I migrated from Heroku to OpsWorks a year ago and couldn't be happier.
    • destroytoday 11y ago
      Great to hear! My goal is to transition to AWS this year. I'll be sure to write about the cost differences.
      • brohoolio 11y ago
        I'd look at Google compute because of the auto discounts. Reservations are a pain the ass if your service keeps growing and shrinking.
      • ahmd 11y ago
        have a look at https://forge.laravel.com https://forge.laravel.com
      • kyawz 11y ago
        Maybe https://liquidsky.singtel-labs.com/ https://liquidsky.singtel-labs.com/ can help you with that transition, especially when/if you need to iterate through your cloud environment repetitively until you get to a comfortable one
• jggonz 11y ago
  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.
  • destroytoday 11y ago
    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 background job workers. The one background job handles integrations with other services, so I wanted to keep that separate from other jobs, like delayed emails, downloading backups, etc.
    • chizzl 11y ago
      May I humbly suggest ikura.co for your web-workers? Less $516.75.
    • zuck9 11y ago
      What prevents you from using ~~Docker~~Digital Ocean?
      • vemv 11y ago
        The same thing that prevents so many developers from using Docker: it's not a drop-in miraculous infrastructure simplifier. It may pay off for certain organisations, but it currently a quite a rabbit-hole, with a constantly changing landscape, complexities of its own, etc.
    • quicksilver03 11y ago
      Thanks so much for sharing this, I will probably use it as an example for a book about hosting costs that I'm trying to finish for far too long. 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.
• lcnmrn 11y ago
  It costs $5/month to run Sublevel using DigitalOcean plus 21$/year for domain and SSL certificate.
  • vemv 11y ago
    One sure can have a DO droplet for a minimal rate, but unlike Heroku/AWS, they don't offer anything oriented to high availabilty, resilience, auto-scaling, performance (via workers), etc.
    • cpursley 11y ago
      Exactly. In addition to what you listed, the ability to quickly roll-back to previous releases with a single click on Heroku has literally saved me from losing paying customers. I don't know what I would have done this past week where I had to do just that after a bad release.
• AshleysBrain 11y ago
  Cloud services can work out super expensive for a startup. To get going often all you need is one server that runs both the database and web server, which you can rent cheaply from any number of hosting companies out there. Sure you have to manage it yourself and it won't scale right off the bat, but sometimes that's fine. This is how we ran Scirra for a long time. Eventually you need to scale up, but that's a nice problem to have!
  • vemv 11y ago
    Dividing your architecture into separate components is not only needed for operating at scale (the "nice" problem to have), but for having high availability (or even decent performance) at all. Depending on one's business, HA/performance may not matter that much, but personally my startup is having a 'proper' design from day 1 - downtime is not acceptable for my business model.
    • philjr 11y ago
      Mind me asking what you're doing?
      • vemv 11y ago
        A sophisticated crowdfunding-based service for a particular niche.
    • code777777 11y ago
      I'm not disagreeing that in some cases it's true. But as someone who provides infrastructure for a great many businesses including startups, most everyone changes their tune when their server goes down.
      • vemv 11y ago
        That's entirely true. But maybe those startups which 'changed their tune' didn't have to worry about servers for N months, focusing in e.g. market fit and growth hacking instead. Lean Startup mode. Personally I'm pretty confident about market-fit and expected growth even before the launch day of my startup. But that's not the case, most times!
• lihorne 11y ago
  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?
  • destroytoday 11y ago
    I'm a solo dev. :) I use Slack as a notification center for all of my services.
    • lihorne 11y ago
      I see, that's awesome! Great job juggling everything to make this work!
    • funkyy 11y ago
      How your setup works then? Sounds like something that could improve performance of single dev.
      • destroytoday 11y ago
        I definitely plan to write about it on the journal (http://cushionapp.com/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.
        • funkyy 11y ago
          Sweet, I am looking forward to it. Good job with the project!
        • svan_dev 11y ago
          Please do. I look forward to reading about the channels.
    • grumblestumble 11y ago
      If that's all you're using it for, you'd be better of with Hipchat, which serves as a functional notification channel and from what I recall is free for <10 users. I guess Slack would be worthwhile if you're using it for multiple projects, though.
• seibelj 11y ago
  For all of you dreamers with side projects (like me): red hat open shift has a free tier with free ssl
  • vincentperes 11y ago
    Thanks for the information, I find outrageous to have to pay $20 per month just for the SSL endpoint on Heroku.
• Beltiras 11y ago
  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.
  • destroytoday 11y ago
    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 ever end up writing one.
    • hluska 11y ago
      Good analysis - this sounds like a smart strategy. Best of luck running Cushion!!
    • rickyc091 11y ago
      From the heroku costs, it looks like you are using one web dyno and 2 workers dyno. The database is on standard.0, which is the first base tier production level database they offer. There's no reason you couldn't host all these on one server on digital ocean. I don't really know what load your server is getting, but seeing as you only need one dyno, it's probably not much so one server should suffice. --- # Pros of setting up your own host. - Huge cost savings. # Cons - Heroku is way easier to scale, just drag the slider. Upgrading databases / redis is still a pain. I recommend going with RedisCloud instead of Heroku Redis. With database you have to do a migration and copy the data over. - Having to deal with securing your own server and maintenance. - High upfront cost due to setup At the end of the day, it's about what your time is worth :). There's no right answer. I go with Heroku myself. The instant gratification is hard to beat.
      • ec109685 11y ago
        You also have to worry about failure of that server or that colo in the "rent a server" case.
• codinghorror 11y ago
  Heroku 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.
  • gary4gar 11y ago
    What about High availability, auto-scaling & avoiding single point of failure? Might not be that important in your case, I am guessing.
  • bengarvey 11y ago
    "Heroku is very, very expensive." "saved them probably $100 per month" I'm confused.
    • brandonmenc 11y ago
      This pretty much sums up the entire thread. No one is understanding that having a few extra hours a month to build features and find customers is worth a couple hundred bucks. It's probably worth thousands of dollars a month.
    • codinghorror 11y ago
      It also performed a lot better, if that helps. Granted for some orgs, even a $10k per month hosting bill might be no big deal. But we package Discourse for usage, and generally speaking less expensive means more people using it. There is a point of diminishing returns, of course, pushing down to $5/month is a lot of pain -- super low cost super low resource hosting, etc.
  • TenJack 11y ago
    We you running Sidekiq? If so, was it able to run on the same droplet?
• ChuckMcM 11y ago
  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.
  • destroytoday 11y ago
    Thanks! Fortunately, the app's usage is pretty casual—users check it a couple times a day, or sometimes week-to-week. Because of that, I haven't had too many issues with server load. Honestly, I could probably run it on a single server no problem, but it's good to have a backup just in case. I freelance alongside of this, so I'm trying to slowly make Cushion my full-time gig. Hopefully, I can make the final push this year.
• jeffmould 11y ago
  I 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 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.
  • nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I think you're overstating it on mentioning alternatives. There's certainly factors that go into picking a particular provider that may justify the price or negate an alternative mentioned. So, I'm also against anyone mentioning them as a critique without context. However, the flip side is that many services have alternatives that do about what they do. They might do so with a lower price or more capabilities. People mentioning those in comments of articles like this facilitates the discovery of those products for people not aware of them. An example for me was arguing that much of what "cloud" stuff does can be done with dedicated hosting if it was setup correctly. That we just need a combo of the two to satisfy certain markets focused on security and dependability where sharing hardware isn't permitted but they want flexibility & low costs. Thanks to a commenter, I found out I had re-invented the concept of "bare metal hosting" and SoftLayer provided exactly what I was thinking about. I wouldn't have discovered that if everyone and I were just giving props to the OP or further elaborating their own use case. So, I think exploring the reasons behind the choices of company in question and bringing up alternatives are beneficial. One facilitates understanding. One discovery.
• tylermauthe 11y ago
  As some have said, this seems expensive. However, I would point out that the costs of using Heroku should be outweighed by the convenience and ability to focus on features. You are getting what you pay for here, the velocity you gain from not worrying about your infrastructure. 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.
  • yoyo_io 11y ago
    Cost of getting one dedicated devops engineer would surpass Heroku budget by 10X. If devops engineer is far fetched as per scale of the company than count in number of hours put in by developers for initial up, upgrade, new emlpoyee on boarding tada tada would easily bet it too. However I wish they would have disclosed traffic handled by Heroku servers as well.
    • nickpsecurity 11y ago
      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 don't work on that stuff but swore such products pop up all the time.
      • _bpo 11y ago
        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. Seems pretty reasonable.
• ejcx 11y ago
  Am I understanding this correctly? Just under 10% of the cost was spent on fonts? $~800? That seems unbelievably high.
  • drinchev 11y ago
    Indeed. For me this expense is totally overpriced. I've always thought that bigger companies use font services like that and not startups.
  • hackerboos 11y ago
    That's the only eye-raising cost to me. I guess when a designer requests it then there's no compromise.
  • smackfu 11y ago
    Yeah, fonts are expensive, and I wouldn't go near a free font I found on the web unless it was hosted by someone like Google. So if you don't like any of Google's free font options, you gotta pay. Also, there is no cost for a designer in the pricing, so either that is a startup cost not included in the ongoing pricing, or is done in house. And a designer is not cheap.
  • brad0 11y ago
    It's a one time cost. The others are monthly costs. Most likely they're paying for a redistributable licence which is much more expensive than other licences. For instance, take a look at this font I'm currently integrating into the app I'm working on: https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/intelligent-foundry/averta/ https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/intelligent-foundry/averta/ https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/intelligent-foundry/averta/buy.html https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/intelligent-foundry/averta/buy... If you want to put these on the web, you're paying $200 per font type. If you want to buy the whole family, that's almost $1200. Companies with a design focus are happy to pay this in order to differentiate themselves from others.
    • destroytoday 11y ago
      Correct—the font licenses were a one-time cost. Previously, I was using Typekit, but I hit an issue with the requests stalling for ~3 seconds. Apparently, Chrome has a threshold of not loading more than ~5 requests from a single external location at once, which resulted in the stall. I reached out to the font foundries and they were incredibly helpful in letting me try out the fonts for performance testing. When loaded from my own CDN, they loaded instantly. At the time, I had some extra cash from a freelance gig I just wrapped up, so I went for the font licenses. To me, as the designer/developer/one-man-team, it was important to have design I intended for Cushion along with good performance—and supporting the font designers who were so helpful.
• muratmutlu 11y ago
  Might be worth checking out things like fbstart or foundersgrid perks to get a bunch of vouchers and discounts off these services. We got 6 months free Mailchimp and fee-free on Stripe for the first 60k i think, really helped at the time
  • giarc 11y ago
    Is the fee free time limited with Stripe?
• lettergram 11y ago
  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 on the app. I can probably get away with like $30 a month with this setup. Including the database. Total setup time might be a day the first time. But it scales pretty well, costs significantly less.
  • illyism 11y ago
    The setup time gets smaller each time you do it and with a more experienced team. You could decrease this further with snapshots or templates easily.
  • jakejake 11y ago
    The hosting costs appear to be about $70 ($30 for the hosting and $50 for the DB). That doesn't seem excessive to me. 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!
• kungfooguru 11y ago
  Seeing lots of comments about cost of Heroku. An easy way to get that down is to not use Ruby.
  • yeukhon 11y ago
    Heroku supports more than just Ruby-oriented applications. Python, NodeJS, already possible.
    • kungfooguru 11y ago
      That is my point.
  • smackfu 11y ago
    So just rewrite the app?
• misiti3780 11y ago
  This is the first time I have ever heard of Papertrail. I really hate loggly and am looking for a better option - can anyone shed any light on if this is a good option ? Which log aggregation services is everyone using ?
  • askedrelic 11y ago
    Papertrail is pretty great. I've used them for years without a hiccup.
  • jasoon 11y ago
    We got frustrated with the UI on Loggly and wound up moving to Logentries (https://logentries.com/ https://logentries.com/). I've not used Papertrail, so can't compare to them, but it's significantly easier to use than Loggly, they've been kind to us through the odd overage, and it does what we need it to do (Centralise a load of application logs and allow us to search over them and set alerts). The live tail feature is nice as well.
    • doublerebel 11y ago
      Also have had great experiences with Logentries. Easy to integrate on every platform/OS, very configurable alerts, team has been pleasant and responsive to pull requests.
  • qntmfred 11y ago
    I also had a terrible experience with loggly. Been using logentries since with zero complaints
  • yeasayer 11y ago
    I'm using Papertrail and the experience so far is not so great. Dashboard UI looks like it wasn't updated since 2005. Also, the free plan is a joke: 10Mb of logs per day. When I started I managed to stay under this quota, but recently I've added a couple features that spits additional log data. Now I have to either filter some valuable logs or become a paying customer (which I can't afford for such thing as logging). Looking to migrate to https://logentries.com https://logentries.com At least their free plan offers 5Gb/month.
• nacs 11y ago
  From the expense report, it says you have a wildcard SSL (and it seems to be in use in the subdomain for the signup page for example) yet your main root site seems to be unavailable via SSL? Is there any reason for this or just an oversight?
  • destroytoday 11y ago
    The marketing site is static-hosted on S3 and I think when I first set that up it was either too expensive for SSL or not possible. I'm not 100% sure, but I'll definitely look into it again. The wildcard SSL was a recent addition after coming out of beta, which didn't have the multiple subdomains.
    • NeutronBoy 11y ago
      Hot tip for when you get around to setting it up - SSL on S3 is far easier if you use CloudFront as the endpoint. At least it was 6 months ago when I was playing around.
    • patmcc 11y ago
      It's possible, as long as you're ok with SNI (which is a pretty minor issue these days). You have to setup SSL on CloudFront to get it to work, check out: https://bryce.fisher-fleig.org/blog/setting-up-ssl-on-aws-cloudfront-and-s3/ https://bryce.fisher-fleig.org/blog/setting-up-ssl-on-aws-cl... I used that for my static S3 site, it's working fine.
• nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I appreciate your breakdown. Helps those of us evaluating various web services get an idea what people are spending and what capabilities we might have overlooked. Neat stuff.
• zwischenzug 11y ago
  This is interesting as I'm doing a lot of these things in my spare time on my own sites, eg running postgres servers and backing them up in an automated way, as well as developing them and holding down a full time job. As others have said, Heroku seems like a very expensive way to lock yourself in to one provider.
• dominotw 11y ago
  > Continuous Delivery Codeship free I had no idea they were free.
  • dwightgunning 11y ago
    One of my initial thoughts was that this list gives an interesting pricing signal to the various services that are shown. It's interesting to consider whether certain services are pricing for perceived value and what the market will bare, or under-pricing for acquisition in an immature market and going for the land grab, or just underpricing themselves.
• philipn 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing this! Why not include the cost of your time to maintain and improve the service? Without including the cost of your own time it seems hard to make budget decisions (e.g. the tradeoff between a PaaS and using a provisioned VPS). Even if you're not paying yourself anything, it seems important to include what you could be making if you were doing something else with your time.
  • destroytoday 11y ago
    I definitely plan to share the cost of my time to work on Cushion. I've been tracking my time since the original idea. To give you an idea, I just crossed 2,000 hours for design and development. I didn't track time for customer support and writing, but it's up there. If I were to charge hourly for all my time spent on this app, I'd be sitting pretty. :)
• thedevil 11y ago
  Anyone here have any thoughts on AppEngine vs Heroku? I use AppEngine for my experimental projects because I can get a simple data model and some handlers running in minutes and a (supposedly automatically scalable) useful backend up in less than a day, and at very low cost. (Virtually free if I use an *.appspot.com domain). You do get lockin issues but don't you also get lockin from Heroku? Is there big advantages to Heroku that make it worth it?
  • mod 11y ago
    I haven't used AppEngine, but getting a heroku instance up takes less than an hour. If I did it more often, I'd think it could be done for a typical CRUD app in < 30 minutes. An instance on DigitalOcean would be more like 2 hours. There's no lockin that I've experienced on Heroku.
    • lotyrin 11y ago
      The case I've always experienced, which is "<framework generator>; heroku create; git push heroku master" is a few seconds.
      • mod 11y ago
        Setting up your requirements for heroku is not that simple. You have to create all the necessary information, like your requirements.txt etc. Turn on some level of real postgres, things of that nature. Most of my time is spent consulting docs.
        • lotyrin 11y ago
          Nicer framework generators will produce dependency configuration, have params for what database backend to produce configuration for, and produce applications prepared to be 12-factor (log to stdout, accept configuration via environment) out of the box. More generators than those will allow you to create reusable app templates which have these features so you don't have to repeat the (still very simple) configuration process for each app.
• Wilya 11y ago
  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 option just to save $80/month doesn't seem particularly worth it.
  • hackerboos 11y ago
    As long as you can factor in Heroku's costs on your per customer acquisition and it doesn't eat a lot of your profit, then Heroku is a good choice.
  • jarfil 11y ago
    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.
• kevindeasis 11y ago
  What is funny though is that the cost doesn't seem to go down much or at all even after a few years.
  • destroytoday 11y ago
    I plan to transition to AWS this year, so hopefully costs will go down a bit from that. :)
• minouye 11y ago
  These "Heroku is too expensive" comments all look at absolute costs and not relative costs. They are paying roughly $200 a month to Heroku. If you do some rough calculations to figure out revenue (use Stripe fees and make assumptions about yearly/monthly plan breakdown) you can reasonably estimate about $3,000 in monthly billings. The incremental savings couldn't possibly outweigh the time costs of switching to another provider. If using Digital Ocean allows them to move faster, then sure that makes more sense. But doubt that's true in this case.
  • vonklaus 11y ago
    I used to say "but we could just build that", but I agree with you. Some of the things I find expensive are te SSL line items and more peculiar than expensive really, a $25 image carousel. If letsencrypt could be a drop in replacement for te SSL spend it would save them some money. Other than that, I don't use Heroku, but not wanted to manage a db is pretty reasonable and the cost offset is likely there. Sometimes these startups are 2 people. So the tech cycle would be hard enough, not to mention business and customer support.
    • destroytoday 11y ago
      For some insight, the $25 carousel was more about supporting the indie dev who built it. :) And sometimes the startup is 1 person, which Cushion currently is. I'm hoping to hire some dev help this year, though!
    • sleepyhead 11y ago
      How much time would it take to code a carousel? How long time does it take to look through the countless open source carousels? How likely is it that this $25 carousel is better than the free ones? Come on, it's peanuts if it's a good lib even though it's a fairly standard feature. I would off course never use a carousel though.
• M2Ys4U 11y ago
  Almost 10% of costs on fonts? WTF?
  • tuananh 11y ago
    it's a one time thing i think.
• codezero 11y ago
  It looks like Intercom is one of the most costly monthly services. I think support is of huge importance, but I'm curious how you justified to yourself that it was worth the cost to use Intercom over, say, email.
  • destroytoday 11y ago
    For Cushion, I use Intercom to handle support, in-app feature updates, newsletter emails, user tracking (tagging to follow up with feature updates), automated emails (trial expiring, etc), and a slew of other things. When I added the cost of that up across other services, it ended up costing more than I'd pay with Intercom. Also, I really love Intercom and their team—they're doing great work. Trying to handle support via email would be a nightmare from simply an organizational standpoint—I tried it for a very short period of time.
    • codezero 11y ago
      Awesome. I hear lots of great things about intercom so I wanted to see how people thought of the cost.
      • destroytoday 11y ago
        Also, I mentioned to them that the cost was becoming a bit much for me as a solo dev, so they worked with me to build a custom plan that I could afford. I couldn't recommend Intercom enough.
• mtolan 11y ago
  Thanks for posting this, I found the format incredibly helpful, and it kind of makes me want to produce a run-rate estimator in a similar format. I often wind up overspending on side-project ideas for failing to take into account the costs of services I'll wind up using. Judging by the Stripe fees, I'd hazard that your cumulative revenue is in the $30k range. I'm sure there are marketing and advertising expenses that aren't listed here, but that seems like a pretty healthy gross margin.
• morgante 11y ago
  I think this level of expense is totally acceptable and justified when you consider how expensive developer time is today. Even for someone fluent in operations, I'd argue it doesn't make sense to cost optimize until you're spending $1,000+ monthly. In the entire lifetime of their service, they've spent $8,727.57. That's less than it would cost to hire me to optimize their infrastructure. Even though I've worked on building cost-optimized and efficient deployments for other companies, for my own projects I first turn straight to Heroku. It requires substantial traffic for my opportunity cost to be justified: I'm typically much better off charging larger companies to tune their deployments than using the same skills to shave pennies off my bill.
• bikamonki 11y ago
  Aren't we missing a key value in order to compare apples to apples? How many users registered/concurrent?
• sklivvz1971 11y ago
  I 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.
• fareesh 11y ago
  At 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 free on your custom domain. - CMS (FREE): We use our own barebones one that's similar to siteleaf. - Redis/Web Server/DB Server ($40/mo) Digital Ocean over AWS/Heroku: DO Droplets for launch + initial marketing, and then depending on how things turn out, EC2 or more Droplets. - SSL (FREE): Recently tried out Let's Encrypt. Works beautifully. Will probably use that for everything in the future. - Exceptions (FREE): New Relic seems to do a decent job, although the paid plan over at Airbrake seems a lot better. Haven't tried Sentry, but will give it a shot after reading this post. - Log Management (FREE): We use tail and grep :D It's messy but we survive - Assets / CDN: Sometimes Cloudflare (free), sometimes S3/Cloudfront (same as article) - Chat (FREE) Glip over Slack: Glip's free offering is better than Slack's, because you can confine people outside the organization to specific channels, which works fantastically for us. - Fonts (FREE): We tend to advocate some decent looking Google Fonts that get the job done
  • jonesb6 11y ago
    +1 for LetsEncrypt. Really great, and if your using DO their is already a tutorial for it. Completely free SSL Certificate. 'Nuff said.
  • somberi 11y ago
    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.
    • pilif 11y ago
      > 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 backup copy into a maildir in case Gmail goes away and we need emergency-access to mail). Google Apps in turn forwards all outgoing mail to that machine too which then makes a backup copy in a Sent-Mail maildir, before actually sending the mails off to the recipients (this step is harder because now it's your responsibility to deal with SPF, PTR lookups and mail server rep in general - but it's no rocket science either)
• euske 11y ago
  Is it normal to rely on this many external services when running a site? I'm obviously novice here, but my NIH syndromes kicks in, and I'd feel nervous if I had to deal with this many companies by myself alone.
• 0xCMP 11y ago
  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.
• patio11 11y ago
  Running 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.
  • applecore 11y ago
    What's more remarkable is the number of services and integrations that are necessary to keep a SaaS product running. Even on a shoestring budget, that's a lot of complexity to manage.
    • j45 11y ago
      More than the cost, the micro-integration hell that you start to get into and out of (when swapping out) can be a real slow down to building and shipping features
  • idlewords 11y ago
    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).
    • tempestn 11y ago
• wahsd 11y ago
  Two things, I don't like that they didn't amortize the fixed costs like the font, carousel lib, and certs because it created those ugly and meaningless spikes. In addition, the site seems to break the back button in Safari(the new IE) on OSX-EC
• xjlin0 11y ago
  So are there any email marketing alternative? other than mailchimp?
• tlrobinson 11y ago
  This is great, I'd love to see more companies/projects do this. Maybe http://usesthis.com http://usesthis.com could have a company edition.
  • josegonzalez 11y ago
    Stackshare does this. Here is SeatGeek's stack: http://stackshare.io/seatgeek http://stackshare.io/seatgeek
• imaginenore 11y ago
  And 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.
  • jarfil 11y ago
    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.
    • imaginenore 11y ago
      200 users is nothing. It's not like they are rendering 3D on the backend.
• zwetan 11y ago
  it's when I see that kind of costs that I wonder if people have completely forgotten about sysadmin and dedicated servers ? hey we don't know how to do those cryptics admin stuff on the command-line let buy services instead and atomise our monthly costs ... I don't even talk about tons of open source solutions that would reduce even more the costs. OK I'm probably biased here
• Grue3 11y ago
  My breakdown: $10/month Linode instance, $20/year domain registration. Unfortunately even that is pretty expensive given how weak my country's currency is against the dollar.