How we saved over $3.5k a year for our newly launched startup | Hacker News Reader

How we saved over $3.5k a year for our newly launched startup

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26 pointsmitchwainer11 comments

Initial setup is only part of the equation. You must now maintain everything you setup or forked. I predict you have many hours of repair, patching, migrations and upgrades ahead of you not to mention any downtime suffered because you can't put in as much effort into making these systems as robust as your main product/service.

On the other hand, I was always taught "cash is king" in entrepreneurship. It's the easiest to spend and the hardest to make. Besides, if you are a start-up and don't have it...hacking something together is your only option.

canterburry,

Thanks for the comments. We have actually been running a lot of this setup for 1.5 months now with no real time spent on repair/patching, etc. To be fair, we are using heroku for most of the open source apps, which makes it a little easier to deal with.

$3.5k/year seems like crumbs compared to VC valuations, but in the context of 20-30 hours of work it's not too bad. Call it $150/hour recurring - sure. I like the frugal mindset for new firms.

Yeah,

It may seem like crumbs, but it could be 140 hours of work from our designer or money we spend on marketing help, etc. We are a team of developers, so we also took it as a good opportunity to learn new things. My knowledge of chef increased 10x :)

We switched over a lot of our operations to open source alternatives around a year ago as well (a writeup is still in the works). We were partially motivated by the money, but more so by the control over our's and our clients' data.

One thing to note though is that there are a few things that just make much more sense as a service, or take more effort to actually run yourself than expected. For example, the way they set up Uptime. They moved a lot of stuff over to Digital Ocean, but it sounds like they still have a lot running on Heroku (e.g. all the apps mentioned in the post). But you need your availability monitoring app running on completely separate servers than everything else you run, otherwise it can't tell you when the service behind your apps goes down. In this case, if Heroku or EC2 go down, then the app that is supposed to alert them will also go down, and thus no alerts.

JangoSteve,

Good point, I guess I should have talked about that more. Pingdom is free for 1 check, so we use that to ping our uptime app and alert us if it goes down. Uptime then pings everything else in our stack.

Using heroku for the open source stuff just makes sense because we don't need addons and we don't have to maintain that infrastructure too - just our main app infrastructure.

Someone asked in the comments how much time we spent on this project. It was between 20-30 hours total, chef being the bulk of it.

Great post! I am curious whether you could move all these boxes to Uptano and save even more now.

What are you doing for CI?

I haven't heard of Uptano, I will certainly look into it. I've been very happy with the features and price of Digital Ocean, and I am not sure how much more I could really save over the already low $45/month.

CI is actually the one app we did pay for, we use http://semaphoreapp.com. We love it, has great github integration.

The benefit of Uptano would be that their boxes are dedicated so you'd potentially get more horse power, which is always appreciated when you're running a Ruby app.

I think you made the right choice with paying for hosted CI. The past three teams I've worked on have spent an obscene amount of time babysitting Jenkins/Hudson in the past.

Yeah, the last place I worked at had a crazy/complicated Jenkins setup that broke all the time! Semaphore literally worked right away, I didn't even have to setup the testing steps.

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