Hacker News Reader

Comment by rlivsey | Hacker News Reader

Pusher costs ~$49/month, my time is worth $1000/hour [1]

It took me about 5 minutes to setup Pusher and for that I get private channels, presence, someone to handle the scaling etc... as djb_hackernews already mentioned.

We outsource DNS, email, hosting infrastructure, anything I possibly can which isn't core to the product itself.

The question shouldn't be why outsource this, the question is why would it be worth our time writing and supporting it ourselves when we can be working on other things?

Maybe we'll insource this stuff when we're at a point where we hit the 'enterprise' plan on Pusher, when we have a few more developers and a dedicated sys-admin. I'll cross that bride then, in the meantime I'm happy to have a $49/m hit on my credit card and move onto the next thing!

All that aside, it's great to have options so thanks for releasing this!

[1] - http://blog.asmartbear.com/value-time.html

View on HN

Wait, there's a difference between concentrating on tasks that you reasonably expect to yield $1000 an hour, and spending $1000 here and now to save an hour.

If there were two services, say an email support answering service, one requiring $50 a month and 2 hours of your time, and one requiring $1000 a month and 1 hour of your time, are you really saying you'd choose option #2?

I don't think that's in the spirit of the original blog post. It stipulated the example current, risk free value of time as $150, which is probably more accurate, and that would be the figure you'd use to make decisions like this.

In other words, spend an hour to save $150 today, or spend an hour to possibly make $1000 two years from now.

(But I agree with the rest of your post, FWIW)

> are you really saying you'd choose option #2?

This is such a great point. Because there is a world of difference between saying your time is worth $1k/hr, and walking the talk, as the phrase goes.

It took me about 5 minutes to setup Pusher and for that I get private channels, presence, someone to handle the scaling etc... as djb_hackernews already mentioned. We outsource DNS, email, hosting infrastructure, anything I possibly can which isn't core to the product itself.

The other side of the coin is that you now depend on dozen of external services that could go out of business one day or another. Note that I'm not saying that what you're doing is wrong, but that everything should be pondered

That's certainly something to be considered when outsourcing key parts of infrastructure yes.

I know the Pusher guys personally, so I'm confident they'll be around for the foreseeable future and I've integrated it into our code base in such a way that moving to someone else, or using our own server would be trivial.

It's something which needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis, I'm happy that all the components we outsource are both trivial to replace/insource and solid businesses who will be here for some time.

Your time really isn't worth $1000/hour. If everyone starts pretending it is it'd be silly to write a single line of code yourself, why would you when you're worth $7-10,000 a day?

I still do understand your point, but this is Hacker News after all, not Outsourcing News. This thread reads a little like a couple of suits just came in here to stomp on a hacker's opensource project.

I mean replace the words 'subscribed socket connections' in peterforde's original comment with 'web server' and suddenly it looks odd to be paying $19 or $50 a month for something like this in this day and age. Where would we be if there were only IIS out there to use? Or no MySQL/Postgres?

I've not used websockets in anger yet and I know it's still kinda ropey, but this is basic programming stuff, paying someone else for it is a bit, well, raise eyebrows time. SMTP is hard because of the configuration problems and dealing with a ton of arcane and opaque problems with major email providers.

This is something that's actually fun to muck around with. In the end the solution of Pusher is only marginally less complicated than the original problem.

At the moment maybe Pusher's a good solution for a fast moving business to a problem that's not well solved in the open source stack, but it's only a matter of time till there's the equivalent of apache or nginx.

And this is perhaps the first step. So kudos to daraosn for putting it out there, also seems the perfect kind of problem to be using node.js for.

I was going to put a smiley after that first line as it was kind of tongue in cheek, but HN isn't the place for smilies!

People pay Heroku/AWS each month, I don't see any difference with outsourcing this part too. That said, we use Linode boxes because I'm ok with configuring nginx etc... and I don't feel comfortable using IndexTank or MongoHQ etc... for outsourcing our search or database components, so I certainly sympathise with the unease at outsourcing key infrastructure which is easy to manage.

Pusher is marginally more complicated, but means I can call the problem solved and move onto other things. I agree it's a very interesting and fun area so it's certainly something I want to play with more in the future, but there are also 100 other interesting things which I need to work on, so I'll tackle those first.

Definite kudos to daraosn, just because I use Pusher because it solves my problem doesn't mean I don't think it's an awesome thing to work on as an open source project.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com