
Running costs for running a web app - EvanHahn
http://cushionapp.com/expenses/
======
fareesh
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

~~~
somberi
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
_> 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)

~~~
vacri
Google Apps allows you to create groups for free, or you can alias individual
mailboxes (if you're okay with thing@ going to just one person). No need to
run through your own middlebox. You do need to make sure that external people
can send to the given group, though.

~~~
pilif
Yeah. I know - but I also wanted the free backups with instant-imapd support
for when Google decides that they want to cancel our account for $REASONS and
we won't have anybody to call (to this day still my biggest worry with google
apps)

------
jeffmould
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.

~~~
TheCowboy
I agree and would add that it's easy to look at their spend and think that's a
waste, but I think with many endeavors, an individual's time is usually the
scarcest resource.

Web services expenses aren't even close to their cost of adding an additional
employee to solve these problems in-house.

Learning to automate something a more seasoned *NIX veteran could do in an
hour is not always a predictable time expense, and then they might create bugs
or run into other issues. $100/month can a bargain and buy you time to do more
important things.

Researching services to use can turn into a black hole. There is always a
better service that you don't know about. It can be better to decide "I will
spend one hour researching metrics/dashboard services, and pick the best one I
find, and spend another testing out the service." rather than trying to end up
with the most perfect solution and testing every solution there is.

That said, sometimes it's more time efficient to avoid having one extra
service to maintain. One has to avoid using a service in a way that the
business is too dependent on it, or that the service is not easily replaced.
That's just part of what makes running a business hard.

~~~
jeffmould
That's a good point about individual's time being a resource. There are many
things I am good at and there are many things I am not so good at. I would
gladly pay a premium to a service to have them handle the things I am not good
at, especially when just in the startup phase. So while one person may think
that saving a buck here is an option, for me that buck may be the difference
between being able to continue business, having to hire someone internally, or
not having a business at all.

That's another good point about researching services can turn into a black
hole. It is almost like the question of what framework/language should I use
to build my startup.

~~~
0xCMP
Exactly, isn't that the reason why startups "need" so much money anyways? To
get the best people to solve problems? In that case, it's a one off and you
solve the issue. Definitely seems like the smarter business move to me too.

------
patio11
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.

~~~
idlewords
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
Ha, I totally hear you on the second one. There are a number of situations
where I've chosen to do something in-house rather than using one of these
vendors, partially because I prefer to spend time managing the technical
solution over (admittedly much less time :) ) handling the paperwork of one
more vendor.

Of course, it's also just my natural inclination. My common response to
problems is more along the lines of, "I can write a script to do this," than,
"I bet there's a SaaS for this." That may well be inefficient, but it's how I
roll.

------
morgante
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.

------
tylermauthe
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
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
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.

~~~
axelfontaine
For JVM apps Boxfuse ([https://boxfuse.com](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.

~~~
nickpsecurity
Now _that_ is a bit closer to what I'm talking about. I appreciate the tip
about this service as I know some Java people that might like it. You might
find it interesting that these Java VM services are actually similar to what
safety-critical, embedded industry has been doing for a while:

[http://www.aonix.com/pdf/PercDatasheet.pdf](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.

------
AshleysBrain
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
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.

~~~
Negitivefrags
Dividing your architecture into separate components will probably cause you
more downtime and have much worse performance.

Less servers and components mean less things to break.

Grab a dedicated server and host your shit on it (have a DB replica because
losing data sucks, but that is easy). You will be able to run like that for
_much_ longer than you probably suspect and the chance of downtime will be
massively reduced.

Why? Because a single server has a very low chance of having anything going
wrong.

Not only that, but there is a lot of overhead in performance when you split
everything up into components. You will be surprised how many requests you can
handle on a single inexpensive dedicated server when you haven't put too much
effort into "architecture".

When you actually find yourself running out of headroom on that setup you will
know much more about your application and it's requirements then you did at
the start, so you will have a better idea of what to split out, and a better
understanding of what parts of your app need more performance anyway.

~~~
vemv
Workers are a must for any minimally sophisticated web application. You cannot
degrade HTTP response time (and whole app server performance) just because you
are performing work synchronously before the request finishes.

Similarly, if the work you are performing has any value for your business, it
must be retryable, and the queued items must be safely stored (i.e. don't use
a single Redis server - use something distributed like SQS instead).

All of that calls for a 'proper' architecture. I'm not talking microservices
or anything fancy - just a webapp/worker/db separation and the like. Which is
exactly what dedicated server (or DigitalOcean) users tend to lack at early
stages.

~~~
manigandham
"workers" are application level architecture decisions, not machine/server
level. If you need to (which most webapps dont) then do so.

------
minouye
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
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
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!

------
ejcx
Am I understanding this correctly? Just under 10% of the cost was spent on
fonts? $~800? That seems unbelievably high.

~~~
brad0
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...](https://www.myfonts.com/fonts/intelligent-
foundry/averta/buy.html)

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
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.

~~~
smarx007
Are you allowed to use these fonts in a native mobile app?

~~~
destroytoday
Unfortunately, no—that's a different license, which is strangely _much_ more
expensive than a web license.

------
Wilya
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
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.

------
lettergram
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.

~~~
jakejake
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!

------
muratmutlu
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
Is the fee free time limited with Stripe?

------
jtchang
Heroku is without a doubt one of the more expensive options out there. SSL
being billed per month? Yikes. SSL really should be standard.

~~~
funkyy
The bill looks huge. You can get SSL for like $8/year from reseller for one of
the Symantec ones.

I think that starting startup can cut a lot of corners by using open source
resources and cheap cloud servers like DO.

~~~
hackerboos
You can get SSL for free: [https://letsencrypt.org/](https://letsencrypt.org/)

~~~
funkyy
Yeah, I compared his paid to other paid. afaik not all companies are OK to use
free SSL since it seems it is still a novelty.

------
thedevil
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?

~~~
_bpo
You get lockin issues with any vendor - even server colocation :)

AppEngine is a great tool for a great price. It scales smoothly with an
affordable increase in pricing.

Heroku is sort of famous for getting too expensive at large scale. Their
advantages are their ecosystem (most of the additional services listed in the
OP can be installed quickly, and you're still only billed by Heroku), and
their UIs which tend to be easy to understand and operate.

~~~
campers
Parse.com is similar to Heroku in that its simple to get started and has a
free tier but gets real expensive once you go over that. I'm rebuilding my
Parse back-end and going with Google app engine managed vms for a number of
reasons.

------
misiti3780
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 ?

~~~
jasoon
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
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.

------
ChuckMcM
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
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.

------
philipn
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
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. :)

------
codezero
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
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
Awesome. I hear lots of great things about intercom so I wanted to see how
people thought of the cost.

~~~
destroytoday
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.

------
lihorne
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
I'm a solo dev. :) I use Slack as a notification center for all of my
services.

~~~
funkyy
How your setup works then? Sounds like something that could improve
performance of single dev.

~~~
destroytoday
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
Sweet, I am looking forward to it. Good job with the project!

------
seibelj
For all of you dreamers with side projects (like me): red hat open shift has a
free tier with free ssl

~~~
vincentperes
Thanks for the information, I find outrageous to have to pay $20 per month
just for the SSL endpoint on Heroku.

------
zwischenzug
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.

------
spoiledtechie
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
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
I appreciate this.

------
codinghorror
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.

~~~
bengarvey
"Heroku is very, very expensive." "saved them probably $100 per month"

I'm confused.

~~~
brandonmenc
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.

------
jggonz
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
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.

~~~
quicksilver03
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.

~~~
quicksilver03
I just thought to leave here a link to a sample chapter from the book:

[https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com/read.html](https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com/read.html)

------
daniel_levine
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.

~~~
destroytoday
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_
How about Baremetrics? What did you replace it with or was it not necessary?

~~~
destroytoday
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.

------
nacs
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
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
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.

------
Beltiras
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
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.

~~~
rickyc091
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
You also have to worry about failure of that server or that colo in the "rent
a server" case.

------
euske
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.

------
M2Ys4U
Almost 10% of costs on _fonts_? WTF?

~~~
tuananh
it's a one time thing i think.

------
mtolan
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.

------
nickpsecurity
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.

------
tlrobinson
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
Stackshare does this. Here is SeatGeek's stack:
[http://stackshare.io/seatgeek](http://stackshare.io/seatgeek)

------
imaginenore
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
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
200 users is nothing. It's not like they are rendering 3D on the backend.

------
bikamonki
Aren't we missing a key value in order to compare apples to apples? How many
users registered/concurrent?

------
kevindeasis
What is funny though is that the cost doesn't seem to go down much or at all
even after a few years.

~~~
destroytoday
I plan to transition to AWS this year, so hopefully costs will go down a bit
from that. :)

------
wahsd
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
So are there any email marketing alternative? other than mailchimp?

------
Grue3
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.

------
0xCMP
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.

------
zwetan
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

------
dominotw
> Continuous Delivery Codeship free

I had no idea they were free.

~~~
dwightgunning
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.

------
sklivvz1971
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.

------
kungfooguru
Seeing lots of comments about cost of Heroku. An easy way to get that down is
to not use Ruby.

~~~
yeukhon
Heroku supports more than just Ruby-oriented applications. Python, NodeJS,
already possible.

~~~
kungfooguru
That is my point.

------
lcnmrn
It costs $5/month to run Sublevel using DigitalOcean plus 21$/year for domain
and SSL certificate.

~~~
vemv
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
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.

