No Thanks, We're Using Heroku | Hacker News Reader

No Thanks, We're Using Heroku

opdemand.com

4 pointsopdemand7 comments

Your pricing strikes me as way too expensive. What are your variable costs that justify a price of $249/month for three environments? Surely they can't be very large, since your service is basically a web interface (that's not any comment on the quality of it). Also, consider that the need for cloud management service is much lower with 1 environment than 3 environments. If you ask me, your introductory plan should be for 3 environments.

Appreciate the feedback. We've heard this from others. Then again, we have customers happily paying these prices. If you look at competitors in the space (RightScale, Scalr) we're on the lower end.

Keep in mind we include orchestration, monitoring, collaboration, real-time log feedback, command-line interface, REST API, not to mention EC2 templates for 1-click deployment of any open-source stack you can think of.

Besides making the introductory plan include 3 environments, any other suggestions on pricing?

> We created open-source Puppet modules that provide compatibility with Heroku’s cedar stack (process management, dependency management, concurrency)

If I had a Heroku app but wanted to move to EC2 that'd be great. The rest of the stuff doesn't seem that interesting.

I'm curious. If you have a dozen or so Heroku apps and a few peers you collaborate with, what's your management strategy?

Would anyone actually do that? I run stuff on AWS using their excellent Java SDK and I'm quite happy about the flexibility that brings me.

Firing off API calls with an SDK is great when you're a one-man operation.

At a certain point you need deployment automation that respects infrastructure dependencies, change tracking with an audit trail, an at-a-glance view of environments... all things AWS is not very good at. Though they're trying with OpsWorks.

How do you work around that stuff?

Home-grown dashboard. Works fine for now. It was quite a lot of work to build it but the code turned out nice and concise and I learned a lot in the process.

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