From Heroku's site, Heroku's 4GB database plan goes for 50$/(instance.month) while Heroku's 8GB plan goes for 200$/(instance.month).
Therefore, it isn't a question of if it makes finantial sense (it does) but how long the startup plans to operate to recover their investment.
> I've heard of a company refusing to purchase an external drive for an employee so they could process a handful of ~50GB datasets on their MacBook Air – instead forcing them to use "the cloud" or constantly download and backup datasets.
I find it rather strange how someone believes that it's a decent idea to conduct a company's data analysis work on what an employee manages to fit on an external HD, as it creates a whole lot of hard problems both legal and technical. I mean, how do you ensure the data's provenance is tracked and other data analysts can access the data? Who in their right mind would put himself on a situation where a minor lapse or misfortune (losing/getting the HD stolen) could put the company at risk?
> Roughly I'd suggest that "fits on my laptop" is <1TB, "fits in memory" is < 1TB, "fits on one computer" is < 10TB, "fits on a small cluster" is <100TB, and "might be worth Hadoop" is >100TB. I could be too low on these though.
That's a rather naive and missinformed take on Hadoop. Hadoop might be conflated with big data but it's actually a distributed system designed to reliably process data shards without having to incur a penalty to move data around. It makes absolutely no sense to base your assertion on data volumes alone. What matters if it the performance increase justifies setting up a hadoop cluster with the resourses available to a company.