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We started to pay for Sentry a few years back since it was both cheaper and easier than hosting it ourselves. Might be cheaper for a lone hacker to self host o

We started to pay for Sentry a few years back since it was both cheaper and easier than hosting it ourselves. Might be cheaper for a lone hacker to self host on a VM running multiple applications. But if you are to host Sentry on a separate VM the cost quickly exceeds the SaaS service. The reasons for self hosting are probably more related to compliance, security and direct database access than cost.

webscaleizfun 10y ago
Just curious, what was the biggest cost, storage, CPU, RAM, bandwidth or matinence? Any kinda breakdown you could give? Just trying to figure out what made SaaS a good value vs hosting on site, were you able to get rid of a server & the associated power & maintenance costs?
- robinwassen 10y ago
  I estimate engineering to cost $50/h. So each hour engineering spend on self hosting is almost 2 months at the SaaS. On top of that an isolated dedicated VM and database probably cost about $20-30 per month. To be honest I have not done any in detail breakdown, the main factor was that we did not want to spend engineering resources when we didn't need to.
  - webscaleizfun 10y ago
    Makes sense, its easy to end up with a mythical man month type situation.
- zeeg 10y ago
  I'll echo what @robinwassen said. It's almost always going to be engineering time. We are going to have lower hardware costs at scale, but we are also going to charge a premium there (to operate our business, of course). It just ends up being more and more engineering hours the more you utilize things like Sentry, which often correlates to how successful your business is. Scrappy lean startup who has no resources and no traffic? Great you can bring up our docker container. Growing company? VC backed startup? Large corp? We offload all of your cares for a trivial cost, which is especially important since we're monitoring a core chunk of the 'health' of your business.

webscaleizfun 10y ago

Just curious, what was the biggest cost, storage, CPU, RAM, bandwidth or matinence? Any kinda breakdown you could give? Just trying to figure out what made SaaS a good value vs hosting on site, were you able to get rid of a server & the associated power & maintenance costs?

robinwassen 10y ago
I estimate engineering to cost $50/h. So each hour engineering spend on self hosting is almost 2 months at the SaaS. On top of that an isolated dedicated VM and database probably cost about $20-30 per month. To be honest I have not done any in detail breakdown, the main factor was that we did not want to spend engineering resources when we didn't need to.
- webscaleizfun 10y ago
  Makes sense, its easy to end up with a mythical man month type situation.
zeeg 10y ago
I'll echo what @robinwassen said. It's almost always going to be engineering time. We are going to have lower hardware costs at scale, but we are also going to charge a premium there (to operate our business, of course). It just ends up being more and more engineering hours the more you utilize things like Sentry, which often correlates to how successful your business is. Scrappy lean startup who has no resources and no traffic? Great you can bring up our docker container. Growing company? VC backed startup? Large corp? We offload all of your cares for a trivial cost, which is especially important since we're monitoring a core chunk of the 'health' of your business.