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This info is actually very useful for me as it confirms my (rational) fear of accumulating expenses. It's way too easy to just spend $10-$50 here and there and
by sly010 10y ago
This info is actually very useful for me as it confirms my (rational) fear of accumulating expenses. It's way too easy to just spend $10-$50 here and there and before you know it you are spending $1000 a month, while the core service is still running on a single triad of web-server/worker-server/database-server combo with no redundancy.
On the other hand it probably contains everything I could think of and it's still only ~$1000 a month, which is not a lot if you work as freelancer and run your SaaS on the side.
- destroytoday 10y agoSpot on. It's also tougher with individual users where $10-$15/mo is the norm. B2B services have it good.
- benevol 10y agoI literally use none of any such paid services. Zero. It's really not that hard. Just automate what can be automated.
- jmduke 10y agoAutomation isn't just a choice where you snap your fingers and it's done. Automation takes time and effort and adds technical debt and support burden; sometimes these are trivial amounts, sometimes they aren't. I use a service that sends me a bunch of fairly trivial Google Analytics data. It costs $10/month for the equivalent of fifty lines of Python. I know I could spend maybe two hours writing a replacement for it and set it on an EC2 host and probably never worry about it again, but those two hours are still non-trivial amounts of time: two hours of my time pays for more than three years of that $10/month. Plus, the API may be brittle, there may be edge cases I haven't thought about, and I don't want to add yet another thing to monitor and worry about. Sometimes, yeah, you can automate things and roll your own dependencies -- and sometimes the calculus works out and it's a no-brainer. But I've found that homebrewing a $XX/mo dependency is rarely the best use of my engineering time.
- codeisawesome 10y agoThese are actually solid life advice for programmers: https://xkcd.com/1319/ https://xkcd.com/1319/ & https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
- iampims 10y ago> I use a service that sends me a bunch of fairly trivial Google Analytics data. It costs $10/month for the equivalent of fifty lines of Python. Would you mind sharing which service that is?
- jasonkester 10y agoI run S3stat, and that's a pretty fair description of the service we provide (for that price). It brings in a nice living from small businesses that can perform the basic arithmetic described above.
- jmduke 10y agoSpecifically I was referring to Briefmetrics: briefmetrics.com S3Stat (who another commenter mentioned) is also a great example.
- thisnotmyacc 10y agoCost benefits though. $15 a month to save a few days coding is a bargain. It really depends on what your turnover is, where you make the most money, and what your time is worth (objectively, rather than ideally).