That's cool and was very much needed. Good thing they decided to go with Ruby, which makes it possible to run cheaply on Heroku.
For those looking for an even more simple solution to this problem (with less features, of course), buy a domain name, host an HTML page on Amazon S3 and use the Mailchimp form.
@uniclaude: the HTML page on S3/CloudFront and MailChimp direction is built into my project called Gulp AWS Splash, which is another LaunchRock open source alternative at https://github.com/niftylettuce/gulp-aws-splash. I did a similar Show HN not long ago for this.
Adding in Heroku 1-Click Deploy and purify-css today!
If you're going to the trouble of setting up and deploying a Rails app, which you will then inevitably need to customise and style to match your content, how much more effort is it really just to start from scratch..? (Personally I'd probably use Sinatra for something like this and I would expect the front-end prettifying to take longer than the back-end...)
Forgive me but why go after LaunchRock? It seems like the point of LaunchRock is to serve people who wouldn't have the tech skills (or desire) to deploy a Ruby app, or possibly even a static HTML app by themselves?
No intention to go after anyone. Yes, LR and this project serve completely different audiences. It was just the least-wordy way I could think of to describe it.
For those looking for an even more simple solution to this problem (with less features, of course), buy a domain name, host an HTML page on Amazon S3 and use the Mailchimp form.