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> $1500 per month, versus weeks of engineering time spent tinkering with and upgrading and bug-fixing and trouble-shooting and security-patching a hand-made sol

> $1500 per month, versus weeks of engineering time spent tinkering with and upgrading and bug-fixing and trouble-shooting and security-patching a hand-made solution is a fantastic bargain. That's only true if you look at it from the point of view of an enterprise, a startup with VC funding, or generally a "rich" company. If you're a cash-strapped startup/small business with only a few thousand dollars profit per month, $1500/mo is a huge deal.

wbkang 11y ago
Wouldn't need to worry about auto scaling Mongo yourself if you at that stage of the company though? You'd need to have quite a bit of traffic to need it. And if you do, hopefully you have generated $ needed to support it.
jacques_chester 11y ago
Engineering time isn't free, even for cash-strapped startups. For a startup, your hyperfocus has to be on creating a product that is attractive to users. Everything else is entirely secondary.
curun1r 11y ago
This is especially true when you consider what that same $1500/mo will buy you using something like DynamoDB or Aurora. Both those solutions will give you more storage, are managed for you and will mostly scale up with you, meaning you don't have to start anywhere near $1500/mo. I know the article said tying yourself to Amazon feels wrong. But focusing your time and energy on managing infrastructure that could be managed by Amazon instead of focusing your time and energy on your product feels more wrong to me. There are exactly zero startups that have succeeded because they had a more reliable and performant MongoDB installation.
- nzoschke 11y ago
  A big +1 for DynamoDB + S3 for a cash strapped startup. If you are writing an app from scratch, and the cost of data services is a big concern, then don't pick a data store with complex and expensive replication properties. DynamoDB is admittedly harder to understand and use than Postgres or Mongo, but when you figure it out its a HTTP data API with no setup or maintenance costs. $8/mo of DynamoDB can easily cover your users and other CRUD.
vacri 11y ago
> If you're a cash-strapped startup/small business with only a few thousand dollars profit per month, $1500/mo is a huge deal If it takes 30+ hours of engineering time per month (less than one work week), then you've hit your break-even point. This is assuming the engineer is $50/hour, including overheads.

wbkang 11y ago

Wouldn't need to worry about auto scaling Mongo yourself if you at that stage of the company though? You'd need to have quite a bit of traffic to need it. And if you do, hopefully you have generated $ needed to support it.

jacques_chester 11y ago

Engineering time isn't free, even for cash-strapped startups. For a startup, your hyperfocus has to be on creating a product that is attractive to users. Everything else is entirely secondary.

curun1r 11y ago

This is especially true when you consider what that same $1500/mo will buy you using something like DynamoDB or Aurora. Both those solutions will give you more storage, are managed for you and will mostly scale up with you, meaning you don't have to start anywhere near $1500/mo. I know the article said tying yourself to Amazon feels wrong. But focusing your time and energy on managing infrastructure that could be managed by Amazon instead of focusing your time and energy on your product feels more wrong to me. There are exactly zero startups that have succeeded because they had a more reliable and performant MongoDB installation.

nzoschke 11y ago
A big +1 for DynamoDB + S3 for a cash strapped startup. If you are writing an app from scratch, and the cost of data services is a big concern, then don't pick a data store with complex and expensive replication properties. DynamoDB is admittedly harder to understand and use than Postgres or Mongo, but when you figure it out its a HTTP data API with no setup or maintenance costs. $8/mo of DynamoDB can easily cover your users and other CRUD.

vacri 11y ago

> If you're a cash-strapped startup/small business with only a few thousand dollars profit per month, $1500/mo is a huge deal If it takes 30+ hours of engineering time per month (less than one work week), then you've hit your break-even point. This is assuming the engineer is $50/hour, including overheads.