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Comment by geemus | Hacker News Reader

I had not really explicitly considered that possibility in working on this. I suppose this is a step closer to that, but there are still some pieces that we would need to add. What kind of things did you have in mind?

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What I'm imagining is click a button and have it create and deploy fully configured apps for me, similar to what I can do with all the add on services. They might be paid or free or tiered etc, it might be a once-off fee or a monthly/annual subscription or an on-going charge like some of Amazon's AMIs.

There's lots of commercially licensed, self-hosted software (blog, forum, ecommerce etc) and hosted-as-a-service (wordpress.com, discourse.org, duelapp.com etc) etc that would be applicable.

Enabling that by API or in general would be awesome.

I was pretty sure that was the kind of thing you meant, but just wanted to clarify. The API should certainly facilitate doing the kind of setup and management that this would require. But it doesn't currently provide a direct way to do the billing portion of things. So I think it could be a ready solution to open source self-hosted stuff, for instance, but you would have to provide your own billing stuff for commercially licensed things.

Billing and provisioning. Please oh please let us provision new Heroku accounts. :-)

Billing is definitely on our todo list as we progress with the beta. Provisioning new accounts is a little trickier as it could potentially open the door to abuse. Which isn't to say we'll never do it or that it isn't possible, just that it is more complicated.

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