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Comment by jggonz | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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

https://www.hostingforappdevelopers.com/read.html

Thanks for the reply. I think you're doing great. Keeping your focus on the core components of your product is probably the best thing you are doing for your business.

I also want to say that your site has a great design. Are you doing that yourself or would you mind sharing the service you're using?

Thanks! I do all the design, too. I went to school for design and I've been coding all my life—it's a useful balance.

May I humbly suggest ikura.co for your web-workers? Less $516.75.

What prevents you from using ~~Docker~~Digital Ocean?

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.

Or ditch the fancy pants fonts with less effort.

It says they are spending $74.40/month on Heroku workers.

Thank you for noticing this. The $175/month came from the intercom services. Given that support is likely his main selling point, I think $175 is perfectly fine for the added functionality.

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