Comment by _phred | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _phred | Hacker News Reader

At $9/month I suspect you are drastically under-valuing the service you provide. Sysadmin time is expensive, and your value proposition is the same as Heroku: pay us so you don't waste time sysadmining your boxes. Time is unimaginably precious for small SaaS shops, and if you deliver what you promise, it's worth far more than $9/month.

Not to nay-say, but if you don't price according to value delivered, you don't stay in business long. Your income should grow faster than the infrastructure that you need to run the business.

It's also not clear what company is backing this service and how you're structured. Are you VC-backed? What happens when the money runs out, am I left holding the short end of the stick?

Actually no I think $9/month is appropriate. A heroku dyno is about $35 a month, and you have a full on solid highly supported service. Here you pay $9/month + server fees which say with the micro instances comes out to about $14 bucks a month. So by doing it on my own EC2 with this service a small instance comes out to about $24.

Only thing is though, here you have the option of choosing a larger instance type and by percentage the charge may be to low. To combat that I suggest a more tiered pricing.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Fair points. We are a new service and are focusing on helping development teams at this point. Your point about the business is very valid and we are working on it to find the right price point.

I think the best point about our service is that since we don't own the infrastructure, you can always pickup the servers in the worst case scenario of us going out of business.

Your last point is DEFINITELY a +1 over Heroku. Although I'd be pissed to lose my deployment & monitoring tools and have to piece it all back together (especially after I thought it was "solved").

Just sayin', this is a tough business, and people get very cranky when things break. :-)

All that said, this is a huge space for new business, and I'm glad to see you guys throw your hat in the ring. Definitely an interesting take on things. Best wishes!

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