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Comment by tomfakes | Hacker News Reader

Here's my current thinking: I use Heroku to start out. If the app takes off and needs to scale, I can use Heroku until I get in place a cheaper/more custom config to support my specific needs - including pulling in the external services I'm using to dedicated servers.

If my app never takes off, then I don't need to do this work.

I find that it's always a good idea to know what you'd do a few steps down the scalability line (100 users, 10,000 users, 100,000 users) but not necessarily build for the biggest case. When bootstrapping, you can't afford the server costs for the big cases anyway.

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We've used the exact same reasoning with our app Denso. The costs will definitely not make sense if/when we hit scale, but in my mind that's a good problem to have. The advantage with Heroku over services such as GAE is that no component of our stack is proprietary (as opposed to the BigTable data store available on GAE) and hence, moving hosting providers is slightly more straightforward.

The Heroku Add-ons marketplace is also a huge competitive advantage that they provide over other services. There are plenty of examples where we've relied on third-party addons to begin with (for e.g. Embedly) but once the costs of using such third-party services increased (due to increased traffic), we switched over to our own hand-made solutions and we were able to bring down costs substantially.

While I definitely agree here, this reasoning makes me wonder a little at the longterm profitability of platforms like Heroku.

Tons of freeloaders (like me) using their resources for our off-the-cuff apps, plus some people using it to bootstrap. As the usage climbs, and theoretically your revenues are also climbing, you get to a point where it makes sense to move away to your own setup.

How can Heroku make money if all customers eventually plan to leave?

Not everyone migrates out because it's not trivial to do well. Once out of the free tier their offerings are quite expensive for comparable(well performance wise) service elsewhere.

Dude, I wished I did like you. I spend so much time configuring the damn thing and it is still not quite there. I did get great deal on the server which is why I did what I did, but seriously don't think this was a smart move.

I always figured why not pay someone else to deal with these problems? Not that I end up paying Heroku very much at our current scale.

Sure there might be an in-between period where we are doing a large amount of traffic on Heroku + paying too much for it, but by then we will be able to afford to hire someone who can set us up properly + at the right price. Either way, I avoid wasting time configuring servers!

This is the best way to go these days, hands down. I can't imagine working any other way now that stuff like Heroku exists and can be used essentially for free during development.

At what point would you take the app off Heroku and build your own setup? There might be different points for most people, but what is yours?

I don't know yet. This flexibility is one thing that Heroku gives me, and I'm happy to pay for (once my product is live)

It may be that my product never needs enough resources to push me over the edge for moving to my own servers.

I've shipped products before where we pre-built a large cluster of servers (20+) and then used less than half that capacity, and that sucks cash really fast.

You may win the award for most rational reasoning so far. I should do that. Maybe it would be fun for everyone. I'm really glad I asked this after reading your answer. I could totally get rid of one of my VPSes and replace it with Heroku until or if, like you say, it takes off

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