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Comment by shykes | Hacker News Reader

dotCloud founder here. I am confused by your comment.

We launched the first multi-language PaaS in 2010, when it was considered a stupid thing to do. We raised $10m from investors who agreed with us that you can't build a sustainable business by only focusing on one stack - you have to focus on solving the hard problems that are the same for everyone and that people pay to solve: scale, security, change management, support for future components, customization. We have 24+ months of runway and already make more money than Heroku did when they were acquired. Now single-stack platforms are running for high ground, as we correctly predicted.

How exactly does this put us in a bad spot?

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And by the way, we happen to be a python shop and encourage all ep.io refugees to give dotCloud a try!

I'm a Ep.io user, hosting a bunch of apps about half on the free plan and a half on a paid plan. Note that my apps on Ep.io are all pretty low traffic apps in general but traffic comes in bursts. On Ep.io I'm paying around $15 a month for the paid apps (when there's low traffic). Your pricing plans seem very ill suited for my needs. As I understand your pricing table, you would charge me $99 per each two apps (they all use databases), both those I get free and the paid apps on Ep.io. This is obviously way too much, is there anything that I'm misinterpreting?

I can guarantee that you can run your apps on dotCloud on roughly the same budget as Heroku, if not cheaper. Our pricing page is tragically bad, we know it, and we are fixing it. For now a large proportion of our sales process is custom, in mostly 2 ways: 1) "I have several tiny apps, help me pay less"! and 2) "I need VIP support and features, help me pay more". This will soon make its way into official pricing. For now you should email support@dotcloud.com and mention you come from ep.io :)

This may sound unglamorous, but that is how our discovery process works, and it's allowing us to build a real business. And in the long run you need a business in order to avoid selling out and letting your customers down.

This is what I found too. Yeah, there's a free tier, but if you want an app runner, database and cache it doesn't fit below $99.

The pricing model seems to be slightly different than both epio and heroku and it seems free apps can't have custom domains - also, you only get one free app + db, as opposed to heroku where you can start for free as a developer and then scale (and pay for) the apps that goes live.

On top of that, epio seemed to be much easier to get started with for a basic django project, than both dot cloud and heroku, possibly because of the multiple platform issue.

He clearly said, "I have no idea how dotCloud is doing.", making his comment simple speculation.

interesting situation, the whole thing (i'm saying this as someone standing completely outside, looking in)

He also said "I think they are in a rough spot", when we see exactly the opposite happening.

"I love the team" -> we love you too! :)

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