AppHarbor (YC W11) announces pricing

Background: I develop line of business .NET applications on full time basis.

I can not make sense of this pricing page at all. What's a worker? There is no concept of a worker in .NET world.

Okie, you are saying that a worker is actually a process. Why not call it worker process? What happens if I have one worker and my application crashes due to unhandled exception? Do you automatically restart it? How long does it take to restart? What happens to other client requests while restart is taking place? As someone who has not used any PAAS in production environment, how do I decide how many workers do I need? I think it's your job as a service provider to educate me on how I can move away from my current infrastructure.

Let's look at the Add On Pricing https://appharbor.com/addons.

Dedicated SQL Server - Hecto (10GB) - 180$/month.

Shared SQL Server - Yocto plan is free and Nano plan costs money. It's okie to use cute plan names but why not include the detail that Yocto plan provides 20MB storage and Nano plan provides 10GB storage?

I can't help but link to Patrick's comments about Heroku's pricing (I am guessing you are taking inspiration from their pricing).

Patrick's original comment when Heroku announced pricing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=577622

Follow up: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1133051

On a related note, I think you should definitely check out how http://phpfog.com is selling itself. I used to develop web applications in PHP and when I went to their page on 'How It Works', I understood it right away.

https://www.phpfog.com/platform [And bonus points for being so beautiful.]

Next, I look at their pricing page:

https://www.phpfog.com/pricing

Once again, their pricing page lists hardware specs so that I can relate to my current infrastructure. But if you notice, they let me run maximum of 10 apps on Silver cloud. So they decided that it only makes sense to run maximum of 10 apps if you have 613MB of memory. I think you should do something similar to educate people about PAAS. When I decided to try them out, the entire process to setup a running WordPress installation was seamless and took less than 5 minutes. I was so impressed that I immediately signed up for the silver cloud. At 30 bucks a month with 10 apps, a WordPress installation on a fully managed server costs me 3 bucks a month. It can't get cheaper than that. This month I am going to cancel my slicehost VPS because I frankly don't have any time/patience/expertise to manage my own server. Thank you very much.

For you guys, I would suggest that you should have some sample applications in your dashboard which user can install and play with (e.g. NerdDinner http://nerddinner.codeplex.com/). Let them get familiar to what your offering is before they decide to commit to your platform.

I am going to sign up for AppHarbor and see if it matches up my fantastic experience with phpfog and give you further feedback later on.

I have a suggestion regarding pricing plans naming. These names sound fancy and unique but miss an important objective. A pricing page is arguably the most important page (apart from landing page) on your website. And with these names an average user will feel confused because :- 1. These are not the standard names across all the websites. 2. Lack of documentation around the details of pricing. 3. It makes users think about what these plans stand for (violating basic principle of design).

Simplicity is important as well as useful. Something like - "Basic, Standard, Premium" gives user some basic idea about plans instantly. And don't forget, vocabulary plays important role in UX.

Link to the actual pricing page: https://appharbor.com/pricing

There's a considerable lack of documentation around exactly what it is you are getting. The pricing page has no info, the blog post has just a tiny bit more.

Heroku does a great job of really detailing their infrastructure and having that map to a dyno. PHPFog uses a different approach and details specs. Both are more transparent.

I assume a worker is a single thread (much like a dyno), but "Improve the reliability and responsiveness of your website." isn't nearly enough detail.

I have been using AppHarbor for about 5 months now, having deployed 2 very different applications to it.

The first is my company website which admittedly doesn't get a whole load of traffic and survives completely on their free instance, free 20mb database and a custom domain name.

The second is a client's website with 2 instances, a 10GB database and several other addons.

With my first, I feel the new pricing puts me off, the site is low traffic and doesn't need a lot of resources to run. I could pay the new $10 per month for a custom domain name or I could just stick the site on a cheap shared hosting package, I use a provider that charges me $65 per year for 20+ domain names on it. Although I do get easier deployment, building etc with AppHarbor its not a compelling story as I don't change my company site that much to justify it.

With my second website, I found it much easier as the client want to move fast and AppHarbor's build and seamless deploy really helped as the client could refresh the page and see the changes. AppHarbor really works well with this client and he has come to appreciate that although it is more expensive than say shared or VPS that the uptime is better and it costs him less money as I don't bother charging for 2 minute changes that I can do quickly and push to AppHarbor.

Overall, I have mixed feelings about these pricing changes, especially as I started looking at what Heroku is offering. I plan to play around over the weekend with NancyFX, Mono and Heroku. Perhaps that combination would work well with my smaller clients.

I have been using AppHarbor for the past few months and have been very impressed.

The new pricing seems reasonable, but I would like to know exactly what a "worker" is (e.g. is it a worker process, a thread, or a server?).

All in all, its possible to get up and running with a < 10GB shared SQL Server instance running a site with your own domain for $20/month. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

<rant> Why (when you could deploy your own PaaS layer on just about any Cloud hosting provider from Amazon to Rackspace on any hyper-visor) are people still insisting on paying public PaaS vendors to re-sell them computing hours and lock them into their proprietary platforms - when will people wake up and see that Heroku, AppHarbor, and all the rest are just locking you in and getting your addicted to services! Just once, test out deploying cloud foundry or better yet deploy activestate's stackato (built on cloud foundry) onto the cloud hosting provider and run your own private PaaS http://community.activestate.com/stackato </rant>

Honest question: why would I use this over a Windows rackspace instance costing about the same per month?