Also, I mentioned to them that the cost was becoming a bit much for me as a solo dev, so they worked with me to build a custom plan that I could afford. I couldn't recommend Intercom enough.
The decision to cancel Baremetrics is a long story, but the main reason is that I don't agree with a few tactics they've used to improve MRR, like removing the ability for users to cancel their account on their own (you now need to email them). I'd rather make a little less in order to improve the user experience and build a better relationship with users. I use ChartMogul now, which I really enjoy using.
The marketing site is static-hosted on S3 and I think when I first set that up it was either too expensive for SSL or not possible. I'm not 100% sure, but I'll definitely look into it again. The wildcard SSL was a recent addition after coming out of beta, which didn't have the multiple subdomains.
I definitely plan to write about it on the journal (http://cushionapp.com/journal). I have channels for new users, Stripe charges/subscriptions, errors from Sentry, build notifications, and support notifications. I plan to also build some Slack bots that would help automate a few things.
I definitely plan to share the cost of my time to work on Cushion. I've been tracking my time since the original idea. To give you an idea, I just crossed 2,000 hours for design and development. I didn't track time for customer support and writing, but it's up there. If I were to charge hourly for all my time spent on this app, I'd be sitting pretty. :)
For Cushion, I use Intercom to handle support, in-app feature updates, newsletter emails, user tracking (tagging to follow up with feature updates), automated emails (trial expiring, etc), and a slew of other things. When I added the cost of that up across other services, it ended up costing more than I'd pay with Intercom. Also, I really love Intercom and their team—they're doing great work. Trying to handle support via email would be a nightmare from simply an organizational standpoint—I tried it for a very short period of time.
Correct—the font licenses were a one-time cost. Previously, I was using Typekit, but I hit an issue with the requests stalling for ~3 seconds. Apparently, Chrome has a threshold of not loading more than ~5 requests from a single external location at once, which resulted in the stall. I reached out to the font foundries and they were incredibly helpful in letting me try out the fonts for performance testing. When loaded from my own CDN, they loaded instantly. At the time, I had some extra cash from a freelance gig I just wrapped up, so I went for the font licenses. To me, as the designer/developer/one-man-team, it was important to have design I intended for Cushion along with good performance—and supporting the font designers who were so helpful.
For some insight, the $25 carousel was more about supporting the indie dev who built it. :) And sometimes the startup is 1 person, which Cushion currently is. I'm hoping to hire some dev help this year, though!
Thanks! Fortunately, the app's usage is pretty casual—users check it a couple times a day, or sometimes week-to-week. Because of that, I haven't had too many issues with server load. Honestly, I could probably run it on a single server no problem, but it's good to have a backup just in case. I freelance alongside of this, so I'm trying to slowly make Cushion my full-time gig. Hopefully, I can make the final push this year.
At the time, I was eager to build the app and focus on its features and getting it online. I don't know much about renting hardware, setting up a system, and scaling, so I was gladly willing to pay to make that easier on myself. The $3400 lost actually bought me a lot more of my own time, which I consider more valuable in the long run. I'd be interested in reading a blog post about how you'd slash the cost, if you ever end up writing one.
The strikethroughs are for services I once used, but have since cancelled because I either moved to another service or no longer needed that service anymore. Early on, I paid for Code Climate, but realized it was an expensive non-necessity at the time. For services like Mailchimp, I moved my newsletter to Intercom once the spiked cost of Mailchimp didn't make sense to keep.
Hi! I run Cushion. Moving off Heroku is definitely high on my to-do list. So far, since I'm a solo dev, I've taken the mindset of paying for convenience services that would allow me to spend more time working on the app. Now, I'm getting into the phase where I can start reducing these costs and transition to a system that doesn’t induce fear when I need to add another server. Right now, I have two web workers and two background job workers. The one background job handles integrations with other services, so I wanted to keep that separate from other jobs, like delayed emails, downloading backups, etc.