

DotCloud Pricing Announced - jreposa
https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/

======
jacobian
The huge jump from $0/mo to $100/mo makes this a non-starter for me, and I
suspect I'm not the only one. I think these pricing points are a mistake; as
someone very interested in this market it'll be interested to see if I'm right
or not.

I'll try to explain:

I'm a reasonably skilled ops guy, so for big stuff I'm still going to want the
control that running my own stack gets me. I suspect most larger customers
will be the same: the advantage of a hosted platform over one I design and
build isn't proven yet.

But I also have a bunch of tiny one-offs that need homes, so a PaaS offering
is super-attractive. I can pretty easily deploy a couple-three of those things
on a EC2 or Rackspace instance, so once you factor in my time I'm probably
looking at $5-10/mo per app being an attractive price point. So it's damned
hard to argument with free!

But — and here's the big thing that'll keep me off Dotcloud — if those small
apps get a bit bigger, then what? Well, on my hand-rolled VPS my cost'll
double or maybe triple, so I'm looking at say $30/mo. On Dotcloud? I'd jump
right to $100/mo.

I suspect this "jump" — and the unknown and likely huge jump that follows when
I go from "pro" to "enterprise" — will keep most casual, smallish hobbyest or
lifestyle businesses away.

So if large projects stay away, and small projects stay away... what's left?

My guess is over time we'll discover that utility-based billing is going to be
the model that makes the most sense for PaaS and that artificial tiers will go
the way of the dodo.

[Edit: the following "PS" was a bit hasty; I misread the pricing detail page.
Leaving it here because otherwise the discussion below doesn't make sense, but
I'M WRONG and THE FOLLOWING DOESN'T APPLY TO DOTCLOUD.]

PS: Oh yeah, one other thing:

Given all we know about web security, having SSL as a value-add makes you look
irresponsible at best, and manipulative, opportunistic, unethical, and idiotic
at worst. SSL isn't optional, people, and I won't give my patronage to anyone
who doesn't get that.

~~~
shykes
Jacob, before responding to your pricing comments let me start with SSL: we
are in fact the most SSL-friendly PaaS out there:

1) Every URL on the platform gets piggyback ssl _by default_ \- no add-on
necessary. That includes the free tier.

2) A pro account gets you _unlimited_ SSL on your domain, regardless of how
many apps you run. Nobody else does that.

We'll make that clearer in the pricing page.

~~~
jacobian
I'm not sure what "piggyback" SSL means, or "unlimited" for that matter — but
no matter; it's clear enough that you're not using SSL as a way of getting
people to upgrade.

Thanks for clarifying; the pricing page made it seem like you'd need to
upgrade to get SSL, hence my rant. I'll edit the parent a bit to make it less
hostile. Sorry about the misunderstanding!

~~~
shykes
You're absolutely right that it's unclear on the pricing page - we still have
some polishing to do.

By "piggyback" I mean SSL on your application's default URLs which are of the
form FOOBAR.dotcloud.com.

Unlimited means that, no matter how many domains you host on dotCloud, the
price remains the same. This is especially generous since, behind the scenes,
each new SSL-enabled domain requires a dedicated IP, which costs us an extra
$20-$30/month on EC2.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
Where does that 20-30$/month come from? Elastic IPs are free when attached to
instances..

~~~
gwil
Load balancer.

------
shykes
Hi all, DotCloud co-founder here. Happy to answer questions as usual. 2
important notes:

    
    
      1) all private beta users are getting a VIP paid account *for free*. Details soon.
    
      2) Hackers and startups will also get free stuff. *lots* of it.
    

If you like DotCloud but think you can't afford it - get in touch.

We'd rather build high-quality stuff, priced fairly, and give some of it away,
than race to the bottom along with everybody else.

~~~
aaronblohowiak
$102.40 per GB-month of RAM is crazy. Compare to $21 per GB-month for on-
demand or $14 per GB-month for reserved (annual) on EC2.

~~~
ericd
This is in the Pricing FAQ, for those who are confused where this came from,
like I was.

------
Pewpewarrows
Private Beta user here. I'll just preface this by saying that DotCloud has
been the smoothest and easiest service I've used in the Heroku-umbrella of
products.

That said, I'm extremely surprised at the number of services allotted for each
tier of payment. For just a single site I'm currently using one for my Python
app, one for the database, one for static files, and one for Solr search. If I
absolutely had to, _maybe_ I could stretch a single service into doing all of
these things (by using SQLite, serving static files from the application, and
using a butchered search system), but it sure as hell wouldn't be pretty and
would probably break under any kind of non-trivial load. One main site and a
few novelty/hackday sites later, and I have to start shelling out for an
Enterprise account (I assure you, the stuff I'm dealing with wouldn't warrant
an account this big).

On the flip side of the coin, there's nothing stopping me (that I know of)
from re-using services. My PostgreSQL one can just have separate databases for
each site. I could re-use the static one if I abandoned the automatic push
command and manually rsync'ed stuff (so other sites' files aren't
overwritten). As for everything else: nope. And you can't double-up with
products on a service. If I know my search box will be used very limitedly, I
can't go ahead and use more resources on it by through Redis on there as well.
They have to stay separate services. There's no way for me to quickly spin-up
a novelty/hackday site that I know won't get a lot of traffic without having
to upgrade all the way to Enterprise. I really want to continue using DotCloud
as my experience with it has been phenomenal thus far, but I just can't
justify the cost:benefit ratio at this point beyond using you for a single
site total.

TL;DR: If you only intend on ever using a single site on DotCloud, this seems
more than reasonable. You're only going to be using a few services, and they
scale auto-magically for you by adding additional paid-for resources as long
as you don't design like an idiot. But add one more site to that mix (like a
personal blog), and all of a sudden you have to upgrade to their largest
possible tier.

~~~
stephth
_they scale nicely auto-magically_

What do you mean by that? According to the pricing FAQ [1] not only there's no
auto-scaling, but adding concurrent processes costs $40 a month each:

 _The unit of scale for a runtime service is a service process, which
represents a single concurrent connection to the service. By default, a new
service has one service process associated with it; additional service
processes can be added to any stack. Specific pricing of additional service
processes depends on the edition of DotCloud you are using - in the Free plan,
additional service processes are not available, while for Pro, additional
service processes are priced at $40 / month._

[1] <http://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/>

~~~
Pewpewarrows
Whoops, I definitely miss-read the portion on services vs service processes.
The beta had no concept of service processes, it would just scale out from the
single service for you. I'll edit my parent comment to reflect that.

... Which now that I think about it, makes extra sites even more expensive.
Beyond the 4 I'm already using for a single site, if I wanted to add a single
new service for a site to hack on, I'd have to upgrade all the way to
Enterprise (with all the cost it would entail). Ugh.

~~~
shykes
We definitely need to make this clearer.

No, you won't have to upgrade to enterprise. You can purchase extra capacity,
and allocate it to deploy as many services as you need. Those 4 services are
simply what we bundle into the $99 price point.

------
moe
Sorry, I find your pricing rather confusing.

 _A service represents a given application or database, such as PHP, Ruby or
MySQL. For example, if your plan includes 2 services, you can run an instance
of Python and an instance of MySQL. If you wanted to use an additional
runtime, such as PHP, you would need an additional service._

Okay, so I pay $99 for 4 of these "services". Does a service equate to _one_
UNIX process of my application running in a sandbox on _one_ of your servers?
How are resources allocated on the (presumably) shared host? How much RAM does
my service get?

And then there's this, which I hope is a typo:

 _Database services scale differently [...] With the Pro plan, database
services have 10 GB of disk, and 300 MB of RAM. [...] Additional database
capacity can be added to the Pro or Enterprise plans, at $1 / MB of RAM /
month, and $1 / GB of disk / month._

One second. 300MB Ram for a database? And upgrading to a still microscopic 1GB
of Ram will cost me $700/mo?

And 1TB of disk will cost me $1000/mo?

Seriously?

~~~
shykes
Yes, ram cost is in fact a typo - actual price is 10x lower. Sorry about that.

When you push your application to dotCloud, it's broken down into services.
For example python frontend, nodejs worker, mysql: that's 3 services.

Each service starts with a certain amount of capacity. Those are soft limits:
you get a guaranteed minimum, but you'll probably get more, most of the time.
It's most definitely _not_ like shared hosting in that regard.

Each service can then be scaled individually, by allocating more concurrent
processes, ram or disk. Specific costs are listed in the FAQ.

Hope that helps.

------
ethank
Hate to be a buzz kill but:

My site was down for 5 hours on Dotcloud yesterday because of a wildcard alias
issue (effectively my cname stopped working).

I e-mailed support and heard nothing until I tweeted referencing their twitter
handle, then got a response asking that I file an email ticket.

In the meantime, the site came back. This is just a fun toy site, so not a
real business, but still.

Dotcloud has been easy to use and deployments are nice and easy, but I can't
justify spending money on a company who really really needs to invest on a
support infrastructure.

~~~
shykes
Ethan, 2 things:

1) This was completely unacceptable on our part. I lose my temper maybe once a
year, and yesterday I did precisely because of your ordeal.

2) Ironically, this happened precisely because we are investing heavily in our
support infrastructure. As we transition from one overloaded senior engineer
to a full-time support team + every engineer in the company in rotations,
these kinds of quirks are bound to happen until we iron out the new process.

In short: - we're incredibly sorry. - we care enormously about support. - and
what happened to you is very rare.

~~~
true_religion
Apologies are good and all, but this is why you need and SLA with
compensation.

No one wants to lose money, then have the culprit say "oops, its growing pains
again".

------
mikexstudios
There's a very big pricing gap between the free and pro ($99/month) service.
This may be difficult for smaller startups.

However, there are "free services for open source hackers, students, startups
and non-profits" if you contact them. See the Pricing FAQ page:
<https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/>

~~~
tathagatadg
If they are really generous towards students and make this sexy stacks
available available at lower price, it will mean a world to us.
Course/research projects are done in such short time that we sacrifice kick
ass features in order to do away with the mess of setting up these services.
Can't imagine the possibilities a inter-school competition with such a stack
...

~~~
shykes
You should really get in touch with us :)

------
nicksergeant
Glad I didn't invest too much time in playing around with DotCloud. I can
_certainly_ see the justified expense when an organization is footing the
bill, but for powering freelance projects, it's not entirely reasonable.

~~~
Periodic
I think they're not targeting freelancers as much as larger companies. They're
looking for a more "serious" crowd that also doesn't do systems
administration. They offer a little more simplicity than managing full VPS
solutions, but that costs more up front.

~~~
nicksergeant
I get that, but the more "serious" crowd usually _does_ do sysadmin.
Freelancers can be deceivingly profitable, IMO. I have 10+ sites that I'd
easily pay the $99/mo to host if they gave me unlimited sites at that price
point.

------
fduran
Hello, this looks great. A couple of comments:

\- first time I went to the site I got a nginx 404 message.

\- In the browser (Chrome for example) the https in the address bar is shown
as "insecure" because it has non-https components, looks like changing the
<http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.1/jquery.js> call to https
will fix this.

\- The "See the Full List >" link on the front page doesn't take me to a list
of supported components but the "Platform Overview" page in the documentation.

------
ApolloRising
Lack of custom domains on the Free is really unfortunate. People like to see
their sites live on a real domain before investing the 1200 a year in hosting.

I think you need to put a smaller tier 25, 50, 100 and then ramp up from there
if you want to get some of the early startup market.

~~~
vladd
At our startup (kind of a dotcloud specialized for server-side JavaScript) we
offer custom domains support [1] starting at $29.95/month, but in general we
found out that people take out the time to try the product and the user
experience on the free plan before putting any real money into the service.

Maybe it's a behaviour specific for this audience (early adopters in this
market are more likely to be individual or startup programmers rather than
typical hosting clients, and the technology is relatively new which makes the
value proposition to be hard to grasp without a hands-on experience).

[1] <https://secure.erbix.com/pricing>

~~~
StavrosK
Eh, people always want the things they want for free. "It's a pity the free
tier doesn't include the thing I want most, if it did I might pay for it down
the line".

They rarely do.

------
silverlight
I have to say, I'm not sure what the benefit of this service is. I understand
where you're trying to positon yourselves (a "Heroku for eveything"), but to
me that just doesn't work.

If I really want to not deal with the headaches of managing an infrastructure,
I'd really prefer to go with a provider who picks a language and becomes a
major player in that field (e.g. EngineYard, Heroku); companies that really
push the envelope and give back and are a _part_ of the community. It just
feels like you're going to be decent at a lot of stacks, and master of none.

If on the other hand I really have a need for 30 different types of services,
and I don't want to work with 30 different service providers (Heroku +
RedisToGo + etc.), I would probably be a big enough company/app to be
comfortable just running things myself on AWS.

About the only way I think you could compete in this space (at least from my
personal prospective) is to be cheaper than Heroku, EngineYard, RedisToGo,
etc. for those particular stacks -- the idea being that you're not going to
get the "major player" in Ruby to host your site, but you're not quite just
using bare-metal AWS, either.

I really don't know why I'd pay the same or more than specialized service
providers for a "jack of all trades".

EDIT: That being said, I do notice that you have stacks available for PHP,
Perl, and other languages/tools that maybe don't have such an established PaaS
provider as the Ruby ecosystem does. So maybe it's not too later to capture
that market. I just don't see myself jumping on board the generic PaaS train
for solutions where there are great, established providers out there (Ruby,
Redis, CloudDB, others).

------
calloc
Wow, this pricing is actually more expensive than I had hoped for. While the
one app I am running at the moment requires just two services, but it does use
a custom domain, and $99 a month for something that doesn't make me money
(yet, hopefully). I love the idea of Dotcloud, and really do want to continue
using it, but would love for them to introduce a tier between free and the
$99.

I am by no means suggesting that everything should be available for free, I am
more than willing to pay my fair share.

------
dstein
I'm glad to see free-tiers becoming commonplace. There's enough barrier to
entry for people to learn these new cloud platforms as it is. And once you're
hooked, you're hooked.

------
prayag
I have been a happy dotcloud beta user for a month. As a founder of a small
start-up outsourcing the entire sysadmin work is a great advantage and .the
support on the IRC has been very valuable. The pricing seems a little steep
but I would think that the time saved on doing sysadmin is a great value and
would be decent trade-off for most start-ups.

Though I do wish that they would beef up their support staff so that the
issues are resolved faster than they are now.

~~~
prayag
Forgot to mention that Solomon and Jerome are extremely knowledgeable
engineers and very helpful. They hang out at freenode IRC at #dotcloud.

------
vyrotek
_Stack Choice - Any Stack_

ANY stack? How about .Net? :)

~~~
shykes
It's on the way :)

~~~
vyrotek
Consider me intrigued!

We're currently running on Azure. I'm very interested to see how you'll
compare to them and AppHarbor.

------
alvivar
I would recommend something between Free and Pro, If I were about to launch a
startup I won't pay $100 a month at the beginning. A programming language, a
database and a custom domain are the basics, this "combo" needs to be an
option.

With the free account we could test the platform and develop, with the
"startup account" we can launch our product, with a little success we take an
upgrade to pro for cache, etc.

~~~
matthewphiong
Or how about a free, startup friendly plan and in return get free marketing
from the startup, a link back at the footer (powered by DotCloud).

~~~
shykes
That's exactly what we do :) Get in touch if you're interested.

------
vivekn
I was kind of impressed with dotcloud beta, its really simple to mix and match
databases and deploy them. But I guess I can't afford $100/mo for hosting my
kind of experimental apps. I was expecting a usage based pricing scheme
similar to Amazon or ep.io. You guys really need to have some intermediate
plans. Its a great product, by the way!

------
mythz
Right $100 is hideously expensive for a starting price, I guess it was a good
business model to announce pricing after generating word of mouth.

------
tzury
To Guys@DotCloud,

Make sure you remove the last dot "." on the api-key. as copy/paste yield to
"error: Authorization rejected" and one shall go and manually edit
~/.dotcloud/dotcloud.conf in order to get back in business

------
lost-theory
One thing that seems to be missing: how many different apps can you deploy
under each level? Do you count the services per-app? If I want to deploy 10
separate python apps, would I have to use the enterprise level?

~~~
shykes
Your services can be spread out across as many apps as you want.

If you need more than 4 services, you can simply purchase more - no need to
upgrade to enterprise.

------
pbreit
It would be cool to see some set of Fabric or other scripts come together
which offer some of the capabilities DotCloud is providing but that you can
use on your own infrastructure or host.

------
beck5
Im getting the feeling DotCloud wants to sit between somewhere in between
Heroku and AWS. A little comparison table of cost & features would be
interesting to se.

------
Hipchan
Is websocket support for node.js coming any time soon?

There are already solutions for nginx/websockets on github.

------
jreposa
It's a bit vague on details, but I'm going to contact them regarding a 6+
setup once I get my code up and running.

~~~
andymoe
From the pricing FAQ it looks like $99 for 4 instances is the minimum and then
additional pro instances are 40 bucks each a month after that.

<https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing/pricing-faq/>

EDIT: Also, +1 for a password reset feature to fire up that beta account
again.

------
jcborro
$1 per MB per month for DB memory after 300. So if you wanted an 8GB db, you
are looking at $7700/month. Ouch.

~~~
thesis
That's one heck of a markup.

~~~
shykes
Actually, it's one heck of a typo :)

Our real price is $1/10MB. Sorry about that.

~~~
thesis
I wish you the best of luck with that price point... but in my opinion it's
still way to high.

------
RyanMcGreal
I clicked the "About" link in the header and got a page of press releases and
news clips. Bad form.

~~~
gabrielgrant
Not anymore -- check it again: <http://www.dotcloud.com/about/>

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Much better. Even better still would be a short written description that I can
quickly scan and parse without having to watch a video. :)

~~~
loevborg
That's definitely true. Like many I'm at a workplace where I can't turn on
sound. In fact, I don't even have a working sound card in this computer.
Videos are nice and all, but they should always be optional.

------
pclark
I think people are confused by this pricing because you get _so much_ on the
free package.

------
llazzaro
I cant login to my dotcloud account. I am the only one?

------
abronte
Why is there no "forgot my password" form?

~~~
MichaelReed
Completely unrelated to dotcloud, but HN has no "forgot my password" function
that I could ever find when I needed it. On that I'll agree that having one is
super useful.

------
phlux
Wow, maybe I really dont understand how these things should be priced - but
you effectively need to pay $99 a month if the only additional feature from
FREE you want is to have a custom domain.

Also WTF is "high availability" if it is NOT available to free/$99 customers?

Rather, what is NOT HA to those users.

Personally - I think you need a custom domain addon to the free that is
affordable to individuals.

EDIT: Maybe calling it HA for the enterprise customers is poor wording. I
think if you state "SLA" to enterprise - that is language they understand and
it doesnt make it look like you're implying that other users have no HA
options.

It makes it sound like your advertising a single-point-of-failure architecture
directly.

~~~
tptacek
"Custom domain" is an obvious customer segmentation knob. Why should they
sacrifice it? How serious about hosting an app is someone who expects to pay
less than, say, $1000 a year to host it? It costs money to support customers,
and, as many people have noticed before, the customers who pay less often cost
_more_ to support.

Strongly recommend not adding a cheap-o option for people to get just custom
domains. Don't kid yourself. Either people are going to find the service
valuable enough to pay for, or your business isn't going to be sustainable.
You don't make it more sustainable by taking pennies from (likely)
pathological customers.

~~~
ryanhuff
Sorry, but for somebody testing a new product in the market, $100 a month is
just too much for such a trivial feature (the custom domain). Heroku charge
$5/month for custom domains. Its all about the positioning, but this pricing
tells me they aren't interested in the emerging, bootstrapped companies, which
there are a ton.

~~~
tptacek
I'm not sure you get it. You're not paying for the custom domain. Try thinking
of it this way: the "Free" account is actually a "Trial" account, with the key
limitation that you can't use custom domains with it. The real account costs
$99/mo.

You might be right about what the pricing communicates. As a bootstrapper, I
do object to the notion that $1200/yr is an untenable expense. I expect that
number is less than what Patrick "5 hours a week" McKenzie spent on hosting
while still a Japanese salaryman.

But: you're probably right that this pricing says, "if you can't afford to
cough up $1k for your hosting, we're not a good fit for you". And I think
that's probably a very very smart move. This is a low margin, support-
intensive sector. A startup entering it should probably not make things harder
for themselves than they need to.

~~~
ryanhuff
No, I get it. As you said, the pricing probably says that this is not for
startups on a tight budget. If I am looking to test an idea with little
downsize risk, I probably choose something else over DotCloud simply because
of the price. Later, when I want the supposed scalability, then DotCloud is
the choice. Is the free "trial" account a time-limited account (as with
Squarespace), or something more similar to Heroku?

See, Heroku is the elephant in the room. Initially, I saw DotCloud as the
Heroku for Django (and other platforms), but the pricing, and how you describe
it, says otherwise. There unfortunately appears to be some market confusion,
as they seem to be targeting a different market segment than many people
thought. The challenge is for DotCloud to educate the market that they aren't
necessarily a Heroku-type service, but something else that justifies a
$99/month price.

~~~
ryanhuff
@tptacek, maybe the free account should instead be a limited-time trial. I
don't see the point in offering a free account if its not to up-sell them
incrementally. IMO, those attracted to permanent free accounts are unlikely to
move up to $99.

~~~
tptacek
Presumably the sole purpose of the Free tier is for people to be able to take
their own sweet time figuring out how the platform works and how to bring up
their apps on it.

