8 ms·

I started Apex a few months ago, first product is a little uptime monitor built on AWS Lambda: http://apex.sh/ping/ http://apex.sh/ping/. Almost 2000 users alr

I started Apex a few months ago, first product is a little uptime monitor built on AWS Lambda: http://apex.sh/ping/ http://apex.sh/ping/. Almost 2000 users already, not quite paying for itself since I have a free plan but it's almost breaking even at least haha. That said legal bills alone were ~6k, so it'll take a while to recoup that. Long-term plan is to have a bunch of products like this which are low maintenance, as long as they're producing some form of positive income then great!

smcguinness 10y ago
I'm working on something right now and legal is kicking me in the balls too. I've tried to delay the expense as long as possible but it is inevitable.
hobo_mark 10y ago
(Very!) naive question: what were those 6k in legal bills for?
- tjholowaychuk 10y ago
  For me a few things: - Incorporating the company - Terms of Service - Some weird stuff to transfer the existing product "into" the company That's about it, but at ~400/hr it adds up quick haha.
  - jeffmould 10y ago
    Ouch! That is really high for just that. Must have been some really one-off stuff for the transfer. Edit to add: I guess it really isn't that high at that rate. It made me curious as to what we paid for similar services at the same rate so I had to go check. Ours came in at just about $4000. The TOS/EULA/privacy policy are what ate into ours.
    - tjholowaychuk 10y ago
      I thought it was high too, I was expecting ~3k. Apparently the terms alone took them 6 hours haha.. pretty boilerplate stuff I'm sure, oh well, next time I'll try and push for faster results if they want the business
      - a3camero 10y ago
        You could try asking for a fixed price for the terms of service too. That sort of work is pretty easy for the lawyers to estimate so they might be willing to go flat rate.
      - jeffmould 10y ago
        Yeah, our bill without the terms was just about $1500. The terms, privacy, and eula killed us.
        idlewords 10y ago
        I just wrote the TOS myself and run my site as a sole proprietor. $0 in legal bills.
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        On top of that, there's lots of free templates and even real TOS's that can pretty much be copied verbatim. Will possibly have been made by better lawyers, too, if it's a big company TOS.
      - 55555 10y ago
        I really recommend http://snapterms.com/ http://snapterms.com/
        danieltillett 10y ago
        What did it cost you?
        10y ago
    - happyslobro 10y ago
      > The TOS/EULA/privacy policy I wonder if there are existing freely available legal policies that would work for any SaaS startup? Sort of like how I can just slap a standard GPL license on my software, and then come back later and offer commercial licenses?
      - jeffmould 10y ago
        Our attorney, at least, had fairly decent templates for all. For the privacy policy it was a matter of seconds to finish that up. As for the TOS/EULA that was the time consumer. These tend to be more specific, or at least contain specific clauses, that apply only to the SaaS they are intended for. While many of the clauses are cut/paste, there are sections that are more specific. Our attorney time wasn't spent necessarily on the writing, as much as it was ensuring that all the bases were covered. He asked us a lot of questions and this was the time consuming part. I am sure some of those questions could be streamlined into a template. On the other hand, he knows that if a question does come up, we are going to come to him, and wants to ensure his butt is covered if something were to happen.
  - desireco42 10y ago
    :) I feel for you. I had similar shock when I wanted simple TOS and Privacy for software service.
joeyspn 10y ago
Also using lambda for monitoring/restarting/redeployment of microservices here... Are you using any framework like Serverless?
- tjholowaychuk 10y ago
  Yep, I built the framework before working on any products and its where I got the name actually haha.. apex(1): https://github.com/apex/apex https://github.com/apex/apex
  - joeyspn 10y ago
    D'oh! this was out of my radar... it looks pretty cool! I'll have to give it a go.
- jedberg 10y ago
  If you're using Python, you might also want to check out Kappa [0] [0] http://github.com/garnaat/kappa http://github.com/garnaat/kappa
danielzarick 10y ago
Three quick thoughts for you which should hopefully help: 1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.) 2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly). 3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or something that feels very high for you. Not sure what features it should have, but there is definitely something you can provide businesses that would be worth that amount. And they'll be fantastic, low-fuss customers. Good luck!
- gingerlime 10y ago
  I would generally agree about raising prices, but not in this case. At least not until you get better traction and reputation. Pingdom is probably the market leader in this space(?), and you will probably need to beat them on pricing initially (even though there's so many things to do better than they do...). Agree about yearly plans though. Makes more sense for businesses. I know it's usually not about features, but I'll definitely look at adding SMS or more specific alert integrations (PagerDuty). Building for developers with webhooks and slack is great, but I would imagine not enough. Love the design and everything else (also Apex the OS tool is great, even though I only looked at the code but didn't actually use it). I can imagine getting traction is tough in such a busy space. Best of luck!
  - tjholowaychuk 10y ago
    Agreed, PagerDuty and SMS are on the list. SMS is the only annoying one really since it's freakishly expensive for what you get (~6$ / 1000 SMS or so), most people seem to have SMS credits that you purchase which just seems annoying to me. I'm thinking about adding SMS to the larger plans though without any weird credits. Thanks!
    - gingerlime 10y ago
      Yes, pricing with SMS is tricky. Just my 2 cents, but with Apex being dev-friendly and all, maybe you can just ask for a twilio API key and just fire the message across?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
joshdickson 10y ago
1) I use Pingdom and hadn't seen Apex. Looks really good. Will definitely switch over. 2) Hey you're TJ Holowaychuk. I know you've since (mostly) moved on from doing a ton of Node contributing, but as someone who uses projects you've started and maintained for a long time, just wanted to say a big thank you for all your work in the open source community. I'm also going to link your photography site (a) for those who haven't seen it. I know this it's slightly off topic, but everyone should see it. (a) http://tjholowaychuk.com http://tjholowaychuk.com
- tjholowaychuk 10y ago
  Thanks man :D
chdir 10y ago
I know you are a very talented developer so I'm curious : Why another uptime monitoring service ? There are about 20-30 existing services [1] with a wide variety of features. I agree you've got a great interface and you'll get there feature-wise too. But are there any significant technically sound reasons to switch to your service ? P.S. My question sounds blunt but I don't mean to belittle your effort. P.P.S. Here's a list of services that do performance / uptime monitoring in various forms. Some might be incorrect / irrelevant, but just to convey an idea of the crowded space : [1] pingdom , site24x7, statuscake, statuspage.io, status.io , runscope, opsgenie , newrelic , datadog, Librato, Scout , Skylight , Server Density , Stackify, OpsDash , Boundary, Netuitive, Keymetrics, Appsignal, Appdynamics, copperegg , stackdriver, xmatters, uptimerobot, AWS route53 health check , nagios, t1mr.com, Visualping, diff.io, Obvious.io, Stashboard, Cachet, updown.io, Pingometer , stillalive, alertbot, vigil, AWS Cloudwatch, Cloudability, StatusGator, CloudCheckr,
- tjholowaychuk 10y ago
  I wanted something small that I could get off the ground without spending a year or two on development. It's also a fantastic fit for Lambda, and I had already built the apex(1) tool so it seemed like a decent place to start. As far as why use my tool? When you have so many to choose from, I'd say choose the one you enjoy. That's my goal really, to create things that I, and hopefully other people enjoy using. I'm trying to surface more information as well, so I think it's definitely a bit on the dev-centric side of things. I also take it as a challenge when the space is already saturated, if you can enter the market late and still have a "hit" then that's pretty cool, and gives you a better idea of you can (or cannot) do the same with larger products. I think almost every space is pretty crowded now to be honest. If you can name some that aren't crowded let me know :p. I would say the same of so many tools: oh another PaaS, another analytics tool, another email marketing tool.. blah blah haha. Doing something truly unique, AND by yourself is unlikely these days. I'm new to this stuff, I could be totally wrong, but I think picking a big market is key, and lots of people have sites/apps/apis.
olalonde 10y ago
I clicked the link, thought the design looked a lot like TJ Holowaychuk's stuff, went back to HN and noticed the username :)

smcguinness 10y ago

I'm working on something right now and legal is kicking me in the balls too. I've tried to delay the expense as long as possible but it is inevitable.

hobo_mark 10y ago

(Very!) naive question: what were those 6k in legal bills for?

tjholowaychuk 10y ago
For me a few things: - Incorporating the company - Terms of Service - Some weird stuff to transfer the existing product "into" the company That's about it, but at ~400/hr it adds up quick haha.
- jeffmould 10y ago
  Ouch! That is really high for just that. Must have been some really one-off stuff for the transfer. Edit to add: I guess it really isn't that high at that rate. It made me curious as to what we paid for similar services at the same rate so I had to go check. Ours came in at just about $4000. The TOS/EULA/privacy policy are what ate into ours.
  - tjholowaychuk 10y ago
    I thought it was high too, I was expecting ~3k. Apparently the terms alone took them 6 hours haha.. pretty boilerplate stuff I'm sure, oh well, next time I'll try and push for faster results if they want the business
    - a3camero 10y ago
      You could try asking for a fixed price for the terms of service too. That sort of work is pretty easy for the lawyers to estimate so they might be willing to go flat rate.
    - jeffmould 10y ago
      Yeah, our bill without the terms was just about $1500. The terms, privacy, and eula killed us.
      - idlewords 10y ago
        I just wrote the TOS myself and run my site as a sole proprietor. $0 in legal bills.
        nickpsecurity 10y ago
        On top of that, there's lots of free templates and even real TOS's that can pretty much be copied verbatim. Will possibly have been made by better lawyers, too, if it's a big company TOS.
    - 55555 10y ago
      I really recommend http://snapterms.com/ http://snapterms.com/
      - danieltillett 10y ago
        What did it cost you?
        10y ago
  - happyslobro 10y ago
    > The TOS/EULA/privacy policy I wonder if there are existing freely available legal policies that would work for any SaaS startup? Sort of like how I can just slap a standard GPL license on my software, and then come back later and offer commercial licenses?
    - jeffmould 10y ago
      Our attorney, at least, had fairly decent templates for all. For the privacy policy it was a matter of seconds to finish that up. As for the TOS/EULA that was the time consumer. These tend to be more specific, or at least contain specific clauses, that apply only to the SaaS they are intended for. While many of the clauses are cut/paste, there are sections that are more specific. Our attorney time wasn't spent necessarily on the writing, as much as it was ensuring that all the bases were covered. He asked us a lot of questions and this was the time consuming part. I am sure some of those questions could be streamlined into a template. On the other hand, he knows that if a question does come up, we are going to come to him, and wants to ensure his butt is covered if something were to happen.
- desireco42 10y ago
  :) I feel for you. I had similar shock when I wanted simple TOS and Privacy for software service.

joeyspn 10y ago

Also using lambda for monitoring/restarting/redeployment of microservices here... Are you using any framework like Serverless?

tjholowaychuk 10y ago
Yep, I built the framework before working on any products and its where I got the name actually haha.. apex(1): https://github.com/apex/apex https://github.com/apex/apex
- joeyspn 10y ago
  D'oh! this was out of my radar... it looks pretty cool! I'll have to give it a go.
jedberg 10y ago
If you're using Python, you might also want to check out Kappa [0] [0] http://github.com/garnaat/kappa http://github.com/garnaat/kappa

danielzarick 10y ago

Three quick thoughts for you which should hopefully help: 1) Double your prices! They're so cheap! The service is so useful, saves dev and support time, etc. Worth more. ($12, $24, $49 is still crazy cheap.) 2) Yearly plans, especially for businesses. A lot of people will want to expense an entire year and get reimbursed (which is annoying monthly). 3) Add at least one more plan that's something like $199 or $349 or something that feels very high for you. Not sure what features it should have, but there is definitely something you can provide businesses that would be worth that amount. And they'll be fantastic, low-fuss customers. Good luck!

gingerlime 10y ago
I would generally agree about raising prices, but not in this case. At least not until you get better traction and reputation. Pingdom is probably the market leader in this space(?), and you will probably need to beat them on pricing initially (even though there's so many things to do better than they do...). Agree about yearly plans though. Makes more sense for businesses. I know it's usually not about features, but I'll definitely look at adding SMS or more specific alert integrations (PagerDuty). Building for developers with webhooks and slack is great, but I would imagine not enough. Love the design and everything else (also Apex the OS tool is great, even though I only looked at the code but didn't actually use it). I can imagine getting traction is tough in such a busy space. Best of luck!
- tjholowaychuk 10y ago
  Agreed, PagerDuty and SMS are on the list. SMS is the only annoying one really since it's freakishly expensive for what you get (~6$ / 1000 SMS or so), most people seem to have SMS credits that you purchase which just seems annoying to me. I'm thinking about adding SMS to the larger plans though without any weird credits. Thanks!
  - gingerlime 10y ago
    Yes, pricing with SMS is tricky. Just my 2 cents, but with Apex being dev-friendly and all, maybe you can just ask for a twilio API key and just fire the message across?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

joshdickson 10y ago

1) I use Pingdom and hadn't seen Apex. Looks really good. Will definitely switch over. 2) Hey you're TJ Holowaychuk. I know you've since (mostly) moved on from doing a ton of Node contributing, but as someone who uses projects you've started and maintained for a long time, just wanted to say a big thank you for all your work in the open source community. I'm also going to link your photography site (a) for those who haven't seen it. I know this it's slightly off topic, but everyone should see it. (a) http://tjholowaychuk.com http://tjholowaychuk.com

tjholowaychuk 10y ago
Thanks man :D

chdir 10y ago

I know you are a very talented developer so I'm curious : Why another uptime monitoring service ? There are about 20-30 existing services [1] with a wide variety of features. I agree you've got a great interface and you'll get there feature-wise too. But are there any significant technically sound reasons to switch to your service ? P.S. My question sounds blunt but I don't mean to belittle your effort. P.P.S. Here's a list of services that do performance / uptime monitoring in various forms. Some might be incorrect / irrelevant, but just to convey an idea of the crowded space : [1] pingdom , site24x7, statuscake, statuspage.io, status.io , runscope, opsgenie , newrelic , datadog, Librato, Scout , Skylight , Server Density , Stackify, OpsDash , Boundary, Netuitive, Keymetrics, Appsignal, Appdynamics, copperegg , stackdriver, xmatters, uptimerobot, AWS route53 health check , nagios, t1mr.com, Visualping, diff.io, Obvious.io, Stashboard, Cachet, updown.io, Pingometer , stillalive, alertbot, vigil, AWS Cloudwatch, Cloudability, StatusGator, CloudCheckr,

tjholowaychuk 10y ago
I wanted something small that I could get off the ground without spending a year or two on development. It's also a fantastic fit for Lambda, and I had already built the apex(1) tool so it seemed like a decent place to start. As far as why use my tool? When you have so many to choose from, I'd say choose the one you enjoy. That's my goal really, to create things that I, and hopefully other people enjoy using. I'm trying to surface more information as well, so I think it's definitely a bit on the dev-centric side of things. I also take it as a challenge when the space is already saturated, if you can enter the market late and still have a "hit" then that's pretty cool, and gives you a better idea of you can (or cannot) do the same with larger products. I think almost every space is pretty crowded now to be honest. If you can name some that aren't crowded let me know :p. I would say the same of so many tools: oh another PaaS, another analytics tool, another email marketing tool.. blah blah haha. Doing something truly unique, AND by yourself is unlikely these days. I'm new to this stuff, I could be totally wrong, but I think picking a big market is key, and lots of people have sites/apps/apis.

olalonde 10y ago

I clicked the link, thought the design looked a lot like TJ Holowaychuk's stuff, went back to HN and noticed the username :)