
Heroku: Commercial Launch (YC W08) - jnl
http://blog.heroku.com/archives/2009/4/24/commercial_launch/
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pclark
ridiculously gorgeous pricing page: <http://heroku.com/pricing#blossom-2>

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patio11
It is pretty as all heck. I'd be A/B testing it against a simpler one-click-
and-done pricing scheme, though. I think geeks get a high off of complex
pricing schemes like very few other people do, in particular, in a way that
very few people who have the authority to sign off on a $3,500 a month ongoing
cost do.

I mean, take the hourly cron option, for example. I'd be asking myself the
question "Is having this standard feature on the pricing page, where the
presence will probably not influence purchasing decisions but will make it one
click longer to get through to entering payment details, going to make us more
money at $3 per customer per month than it will cost us in lost conversions?"

You don't even have to make the pricing different -- just abuse the power of
defaults and hide all the details on another page that 98% of your customers
will never click through to. One enterprise plan: we assume you want the top
DB, our recommended number of dynos, unlimited backups, and unlimited cronage.
One SMB plan. One startup plan. One hobbyist plan. That takes it down from 6
or 7 layers of decision points, some of which are quite complicated and may be
beyond the ability of the person actually making the decision, to a quick
"What best describes the type of business you work for" check.

(Note that this may result in some large business customers overpaying for
services out of a desire to not have to submit reimbursement requests for
"Hobbyist" services. Aww shucks, right?)

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jgilliam
These are all good points. There is something else though that's kind of
amazing about the page. It got a whole bunch of people who make the decision
on what hosting platform to use to talk about it and link to it. They somehow
turned a _pricing page_ into viral marketing.

Plus it furthers their brand amongst the HN crowd that they have their act
together and are worthy of trusting your application to.

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Feynman
Are there really only 3 people working on Heroku? Really, Really Impressive...

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sant0sk1
They've since added a few other employees. I'd guess they have about 5 total.
Still, very impressive.

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jamesheroku
We currently have 11, plus some contractors.

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wastedbrains
Congrats to the team. Their how it works page is great. One of the best
technical explonations written to cleanly and quickly explain a complex issue.

Princing is pretty straight forward as well.

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axod
For those that understand what a 'Dyno' is, is this expensive?

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mileszs
From their "How It Works" section:

    
    
        "A dyno is roughly equivalent to a Mongrel, except that 
        dynos are spread across multiple servers, so 
        performance in most cases is greater.
    
        4 dynos are equivalent to the compute power of one 
        CPU-core on other systems."
    

A dyno is different from the common RAM+Bandwidth VPS slice, so it's difficult
to make a comparison. (I'm going to do it anyway...) I would say that a 4 dyno
machine, with everything else dialed down to the lowest value (so, free),
you're roughly equivalent to Slicehost's 1024MB slice. (That's roughly $108/mo
at Heroku, $70 at Slicehost.) You've got more storage space (so, the db can
grow) on Slicehost, but you have to setup everything yourself, and adding
power will take longer than a couple seconds.

It should be stressed that Heroku makes everything _really_ simple. You can
save a lot of time and energy if you've got the money to get started with
Heroku up front.

I like setting up and tweaking a VPS, though. I haven't seen any benchmarks to
show that Heroku with 4 dynos performs as well or better than 4 mongrels, or
Apache + mod_rails on the 1024 slice, etc.

I think it's a bit expensive, but, man, it's really _cool_ , too.

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mdasen
I'd argue that a Dyno isn't nearly as resource intensive. If 4 Dynos == 1024MB
slice, then each Dyno would be using 256MB. Ruby app servers don't need that
much RAM each and with a 1024MB slice you could fit a good deal more than 4
Dynos in it.

In fact, the Phusion Passenger documentation says that they recommend 30 app
servers within 2GB of RAM. They do say that if you're running lots of other
things like MySQL on a 256MB VPS, you probably want to limit yourself to two
app servers. Still, it scales up much nicer. For $70/mo you could easily fit
10 app servers with your database on the same box - something that would cost
several hundred dollars with Heroku.

That said, Heroku's selling point won't be cost. Heroku makes deployment
exceedingly simple. You don't have to worry about installing anything,
configuring anything, making sure things stay up, etc. And that has value -
especially if you aren't a *nix gearhead. It's more than a slight premium, but
it can still be worth it given that it gives you a worry-free environment.

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datums
I really like the ordering UI +1

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ddemchuk
Not sure if I'm just missing this part of their pricing pages, but if your
site starts needing more resources than what you planned on, does it
automatically and gracefully bump up the appropriate numbers on the pricing
plan and bill you accordingly?

