Cost of tools and services used developing Countly: $0 | Hacker News Reader

Cost of tools and services used developing Countly: $0

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36 pointsonur14 comments

Great post Onur, I didnt know Amazon had a free tier! One of my other preferred tools is Trello.com for visual project management.

Great job with Countly! Would have been great to see the workflow you guys employ between the tools + any specific modifications you might have made for an open source tool/community. Maybe next time?

I tried Trello before and I think its pretty lightweight and useful.

Great idea about an upcoming post :)

Watch out with that AWS free tier, it's only free for a year.

Also many of the cited services are free only for opensource projects (webstorm ide, transifex, tender etc..)

That's correct, I mentioned it at the beginning of the post

Nice job with Countly, looks really good.

This has nothing to do with countly per se, but I think the notion of building products with tools & services that have zero acquisition/billing cost is becoming passe. There are so many tools and options available and the growth of the freemium business model around the software space ensures a growing ecosystem that's becoming more and more specialized around those tools & services. I believe we're rapidly approaching an inflection point where use of zero-cost tools & services is nearly expected.

Congrats to the team on the choices made in building the product, though. That's where the real value is in the equation.

The current link is to the comments thread. This is the URL you want:

http://blog.count.ly/post/33777818277/cost-of-tools-and-serv...

I find it hard to believe they're hosting their app on a Micro EC2 instance. I mean, I do believe them but its very surprising. I've heard horror stories about simple blogs coming to a screeching halt when they get anything more than a few hundreds requests in a short time. Is it really possible to host an app like Countly on Amazon's free tier (EC2 specifically)?

Well, since Countly Community Edition is open source we don't offer any SaaS from our server just yet. Countly Cloud will be the SaaS solution and I believe a micro instance won't do any good after the first week :) But a micro instance is powerful enough to host a website or a blog, even to open up your service for private beta.

I've been mulling over whether to take a dive into EC2 to launch a public beta actually so thanks for your comment. I've been trying to decide between EC2 or getting another 512 Linode to start. I think I will go for EC2 now mostly just to learn a few new skills and sharpen some old ones. Thanks.

If you want to go full cheapskate (not that I disapprove), AppFog has a generous free trier[1], no SSL though.

[1] http://www.appfog.com/products/appfog/pricing/

AppFog, Heroku[1] and dotCloud[2] are all great

[1] http://www.heroku.com/pricing

[2] https://www.dotcloud.com/pricing.html

Nice round up of tools, I keep forgetting AWS has a free tier, but mostly as I keep getting random issues with it not activating my account properly.

(p.s., the link is pointing to the disqus thread, not the article)

You might want to add Tonido (http://www.tonido.com) to your toolset for file sharing. It works great.

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