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Comment by sagadotworld | Hacker News Reader

We run entirely on Firebase with Auth, Storage, Hosting, Firestore, and Cloud Functions. As a result, we actually don't have any backend to manage.

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Do you think that the time-to-market advantage that using Firebase offers you justifies the (presumably) increased cost when compared to the cost of managing your own infrastructure?

Yes, as a data point, the other tracker apps are only now beginning to add exchange API integration, while we were able to develop and launch this feature over a month ago.

While I like self hosting (was previously a RethinkDB user), from a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense to spend time on operations if it doesn’t give you a competitive advantage. It’s going to be very difficult to outpace a business that only has to focus on development versus one that has to do development and operations.

Can you give a rough estimate on the cost you pay based on the amount of traffic you get to this app? I'm considering using Firestore for my next project but I'd love to hear from your perspective if the cost outweighs the alternative of rolling your own backend.

The cost is actually less than what we would be paying if we rented dedicated servers. I think the reputation for clouds being expensive comes from people running compute instances 24/7. However, you don't run any compute instances on Firebase. You only pay for operations (read, write, function executions, etc.), and if you structure your app to avoid operations (i.e. through caching), you end up paying very little.

Out of curiosity, do you use any type of framework for the frontend?

React is used on the frontend. It maps very well to Firestore - each component listens to one document.

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