Anyway, keep up the good work.
We are still figuring out our pricing. It kind of kills me to hear someone call surge too expensive. We worked hard to give surge a very legit free offering which is serving over 35k projects. Surge gives (currently) unlimited projects with custom domains. We charge $13/mo for that extra 1% which is custom SSL, basic auth, custom redirects.
Very open to suggestions if you have any. Would you prefer we have a small membership fee and open up all the features? What would you suggest is fair?
Yes.
Though, I feel a psychological bias for paying upwards of 10 USD for services, since there are so many of them. I feel comfortable paying 9.77 USD for Netflix (India), but 12.6 USD tier just feels expensive.
I have no objection to paying 13$/mo if surge would implement some premium redundancy features. Cloudflare already gives me the SSL I need, and 13$/mo for custom redirects isn't really worthwhile for me when I can just use hash-based history for our app.
Basically I think you guys have the pricing worked out incorrectly, at least for our use-case. Avoiding downtime is the #1 reason I would pay someone else to host something for me (because tbh I can just write an ansible script to deploy my code to nginx running on Digital Ocean if I wanted to maintain it myself).
My set up is not dissimilar to your own. I'm comfortable working on the command line, using s3cmd to sync the site, modifying bucket policies, etc. Once you know those things - or if you enjoy learning them - it's all pretty trivial, but if you don't... well don't underestimate the hassle for someone who doesn't know this stuff. I'd think it a waste to pay $13/mo for what I'm happy to throw in an S3 bucket, but that's 3 venti lattes for someone not to have to deal with any of it. It's not the file storage they're charging for.
In the end they are just tools, and you should use whatever fits you better.
I prefer a volume based pricing model like 5apps is offering it: https://5apps.com/deploy/plans