Cheap or free web-based tools for your web startup | Hacker News Reader

Cheap or free web-based tools for your web startup

blog.flexvite.com

129 pointsmpstx53 comments

+1 for Pivotal Tracker. One of the most polished UIs I've worked with. It's a pleasure for development teams to use; I use it for both freelancing and the day job. Also helps management have its finger on the pulse of progress, and have an accurate answer to the question "when will X be done?"

My favorite tool for finding available domains while discovering product/company name ideas is http://wordoid.com - made by a HNer, I think.

Wordoid is great. Another favorite of mine is: http://www.nxdom.com/

Shameless plug: I threw up http://domaingroovy.com/ to keep track of sites like these. Maybe someone else will find it useful.

Wait, no Heroku? It should definitely be listed in the Price-Scalable Hosting section. Like AppEngine it's also free starting out, and super easy to scale. Plus it's all rails, so you don't even have to learn any App Engine API.

I think it's a lot more expensive than App Engine though. You quickly get into hundreds of dollars a month range for just a few extra features and two running processes.

I'm not sure I trust Google App Engine; it's a roundoff error for Google. Why should they care if something goes wrong? Heroku cares about Ruby webapp deployment the way Google cares about search.

That's a humorous exaggeration, right?

2 x processes + 20GB database = $51/mth

Most people won't require every addon, and there's a free or cheap option in every case. Yes, you can spend "hundreds of dollars a month" but not easily

2 x processes + 20GB database + unlimited bundles + SSL ($20-100/month depending on your needs) == $91-$171/month. And that's for just two thin processes with a few extra features that are generally required for most apps.

It jumps to more than $200 if you want just one more Thin process or a background worker, etc.

I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with Heroku's pricing, but I wouldn't considering it a "cheap or free web-based tool".

domai.nr is by far the best domain finding service and is also totally free. I've bought 8 or so domains with it.

+1 I used domai.nr as well, but less frequently than the other two mentioned. Domai.nr is great for finding shorter names and creative variations of longer ones.

I enjoy using instantdomainsearch for domain hunting.

For browser compatibility: browsershots.org

Litmusapp may be nicer and have summaries, but it's hard to beat browsershot's simplicity, breadth, and free-ness. Though I have yet to see any provide decent testing for anything dynamic (videos, perhaps?).

browsershots.org is good, but some generator nodes can be extremely slow (30 minute wait times). For IE-only screenshots, I like to use http://meineipadresse.de/netrenderer/index.php , which provides IE screenshots in about 7 seconds.

browserlab.adobe.com/ is very fast and free as well.

http://crossbrowsertesting.com is also a good choice (I am biased), we have live testing (VNC) and screenshots. we are working on video.

I didn't know http://www.ask500people.com/. Looks like an useful resource. I don't care about the map though.

Here is a longer list specifically for web publishers: http://publisherapps.org

The recommended site vyew.com looks good, but

  http://vyew.com/

301s to

  http://vyew.com/site

which in turn 301s to

  http://vyew.com/site/index3

Two 301 redirects, and a damn ugly default URL to boot—I have a hard time trusting them to get anything else right. Am I wrong?

How is Google App Engine? Are there any pain points one should be aware of before using it?

No RDBMS. No SQL. No joins. That's the main adjustment for me. But after you adjust to that, it's great.

I thought NoSQL was a selling point these days?

Perhaps, but the question I was responding to was about "pain points". All I was saying is if you're coming from an RDBMS background, as I am, then there are growing pains in adjusting to using BigTable. If you don't have the time or patience to make the adjustment, then this will be a pain point. Otherwise, perhaps it's a selling point.

The 30 second per page limit can be a pain too. If you need to manipulate (i.e. validate, import, export, etc.) more than a few hundred persistent objects, you'll need to write your code to do it in chunks.

That's what Task Queue is for:

With the Task Queue API, applications can perform work outside of a user request but initiated by a user request. If an app needs to execute some background work, it may use the Task Queue API to organize that work into small, discrete units, called Tasks. The app then inserts these Tasks into one or more Queues. App Engine automatically detects new Tasks and executes them when system resources permit.

Python:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/taskqueue/overv...

Java:

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/taskqueue/overvie...

The task queue has the same 30 second limit. Follow either of those links above and you'll find:

the lifetime of a single task's execution is limited to 30 seconds

You still have to do more coding to chunk the work.

Cold startup sucks - it's horrendous for Java and just bad for Python.

If you have a popular app, this isn't an issue. If you don't, it hurts.

Cold startup is almost unnoticeable for Python apps (bite my lip! see update below). On the Java side it can be an issue but, as with most things, if you dig around, you can find some acceptable workarounds.

No - I've seen 'Hello World' style apps take over 4s to cold startup. For example http://timezonetimezone.appspot.com/iscorrect?query=EST

Took 4.67s to render http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100306_5PZ7/1/details/

I monitored cold startup for a month on one of my apps and some times see 10s cold startup. http://www.webpagetest.org/result/100309_5TDW/

This is after profiling, reducing imports, caching, using app appstats, etc.

Wow, you're right. I just ran a test on one of my Python apps and found the same thing. I always assumed 4 seconds was an acceptable start up time, especially when compared with some of the Java apps I have runnning on App Engine which have often exceeded the 30 second page limit on startup and generated a DeadlineExceededException. Thanks for showing your results. I would never have known this was an issue.

Couldn't you just set up a cron job to ping your app every 15 minutes until you start getting some real traffic?

You could - but it would need to be every 1 minute. Google tears down your app after 60-90 seconds of inactivity.

Some folks have resorted to pinging every minute but Google discourages that since it ties up their resources. If everyone pinged their site once a minute then resources would never be freed....

Here's a good thread on the issue https://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thre...

They're fixing this in the future by allowing reserved instances that will always run.

You mean besides lock-in?

There's no lock-in on the Java side. Change a few lines in jdconfig.xml, add the datanucleus-rdbms jar file, add a JDBC driver jar file and you're app will run on Tomcat or Jetty with MySQL or any database with a JDBC driver.

Check out the AppScale project: http://code.google.com/p/appscale/

You can run your App Engine apps pretty much anywhere.

I found this helps when collaborating remotely, to send big files around - and there are other companies offering a similar service:

http://free.mailbigfile.com/index.php

Yeah, I like the Axosoft free variant: http://www.transferbigfiles.com/

Good suggestion - I like their higher size limit of 1Gb. I'll check this out, thanks.

Didn't see this category, but for the developers of a startup, an easy to use / free bug tracking system can be found in BugNotes: http://www.bugnotes.com/home.php

I am working on simplified hosted accounting service for startups based upon open source sql-ledger. There will be a free single user version.

Keep yourself updated via blog or mailing list (see my info)

http://lighthouseapp.com and http://tenderapp.com for bug tracking and support tools that integrate.

The madmimi website gave me a headache.

Is there any site which allows me to display a text box on my site and collects the emails given and allows me to send newsletters?

Use CampaignMonitor. By far the best tool for the job. http://www.campaignmonitor.com

I agree campaignMonitor has some great analytics / at the link below you can view a good screen shot of the analytics page..

http://imgur.com/uq9zn

Mailchimp is awesome. Don't know how it compares to Campaign Monitor. If you're a belt & suspenders type, use a Wufoo form and send that to MailChimp, then you can easily switch later.

The email collection tools in Campaign Monitor are totally free. You just pay when you send mail.

When I was organizing Startup Bootcamp, I emailed both CM and MailChimp to ask for a donation. MailChip offered us a discount, but CM gave us an extremely generous number of credits that easily covered our needs.

Using CM is a breeze. Originally we were using a Google Doc as a signup, and felt the need to switch once we hit a few hundred people. Importing the data was effortless, and CM has built-in checks for both duplicate and malformed emails. Their analytics and reporting is also great. Highly recommended.

Thanks! It's really quite hard to get a comparison of tools that take some usage to understand.

Mad Mimi does this. Click on Tools, and choose the webform.

Woopra is a great realtime analytics service. I'm building our iPhone client...

really appreciated the list of tools. Anybody with a similar list but with other tasks ?

Here is a longer list specifically for web publishers: http://publisherapps.org

Great article.

Great list. Thanks for sharing.

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