Hacker News Reader

Comment by irskep | Hacker News Reader

I think it's more that PaaS vendors aren't interested in first-class SQLite support when they can sell overpriced managed Postgres instead. Sure, it doesn't scale the same way, so it's hard to move upmarket and sell to Enterprise, but it's a shame that there's no one-click solution like there is for a managed database.

View on HN

Let's say the following product existed:

1. You can only run one instance of your app.

2. There is a small window of downtime each deploy.

3. Your app has access to 10 GB of storage. The storage is persisted across deploys and can be used for sqlite.

4. Your sqlite data is automatically backed up and can be restored / downloaded as needed.

How much per month would you pay for that product?

$20 per month assuming:

* Someone who knows Django but has zero devops skills can deploy my app with a few simple commands, add a fix, and demo it to me. Crucial: They must ask me zero questions.

* The backups happen to a non-you service, I one-click auth my google drive and/or dropbox.

* There are instructions on how to stand-up the web app on another service if you shut down. Those instructions might require two hours of my time, but should be complete.

I'd probably be willing to pay ~$10/mo. i.e. a 100% markup on a low-end $5 VPS box.

...but in addition to bravura's requirements, I'd add: I'd want SSL termination, ideally with the option of me bringing a custom domain.

Interesting question. I think you could probably get those features by deploying Piku or Dokku for like $4/mo on a VPS, and the equivalent managed Postgres on Render would be like $20/mo (16GB SSD), so something like $6-10 seems like the right range to me. Maybe not a booming business, but a nice margin percentage and worth paying for good UX. And the cheap version doesn't need to be the only version if people want more RAM, etc.

I'd find such a product really appealing, especially with a dedicated backup strategy that uses the SQLite backup API to do hourly snapshots or uses Litestream to S3 by default.

Let's say the price was 12. If this idea is compelling enough for you at that price point to venmo me an advance for your first month, I have some ideas to explore that could actually make this viable. FWIW, I've worked professionally on a PaaS and a managed database offering.

If you make it so I can have one SQLite database per user, I’d be a customer too

When you say per user, you mean per user of your app?

yeah exactly. I want each user's data to be silo'd in their own sqlite database each. It's basically just a multi-tenant setup using sqlite.

Cool, thanks for the clarification!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com