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Wow, maybe I really dont understand how these things should be priced - but you effectively need to pay $99 a month if the only additional feature from FREE you
by phlux 15y ago
Wow, maybe I really dont understand how these things should be priced - but you effectively need to pay $99 a month if the only additional feature from FREE you want is to have a custom domain.
Also WTF is "high availability" if it is NOT available to free/$99 customers?
Rather, what is NOT HA to those users.
Personally - I think you need a custom domain addon to the free that is affordable to individuals.
EDIT: Maybe calling it HA for the enterprise customers is poor wording. I think if you state "SLA" to enterprise - that is language they understand and it doesnt make it look like you're implying that other users have no HA options.
It makes it sound like your advertising a single-point-of-failure architecture directly.
- ryanhuff 15y agoI agree, although perhaps have the custom domain thing be a smaller add-on option. I can see myself wanting to start with a custom domain for a yet-unproven product, but not paying $99. That's a huge leap from other, less expensive options. I bet a lot of potential customers if pass on them unless they fill the void/need for custom domains at a lower price point. Maybe have a $10/month custom domain option on top of the free offering?
- rdl 15y agoI think by HA they mean failover, vs. compensation (SLA).
- tptacek 15y ago"Custom domain" is an obvious customer segmentation knob. Why should they sacrifice it? How serious about hosting an app is someone who expects to pay less than, say, $1000 a year to host it? It costs money to support customers, and, as many people have noticed before, the customers who pay less often cost more to support. Strongly recommend not adding a cheap-o option for people to get just custom domains. Don't kid yourself. Either people are going to find the service valuable enough to pay for, or your business isn't going to be sustainable. You don't make it more sustainable by taking pennies from (likely) pathological customers.
- ryanhuff 15y agoSorry, but for somebody testing a new product in the market, $100 a month is just too much for such a trivial feature (the custom domain). Heroku charge $5/month for custom domains. Its all about the positioning, but this pricing tells me they aren't interested in the emerging, bootstrapped companies, which there are a ton.
- shykes 15y agoHi Ryan, we think at $99/month the pro account is great value for a small business. You get unlimited custom domains, ssl, scaling and premium support. And if you really can't afford it, get in touch about your project, we'll probably give it to you for free anyway.
- shykes 15y agoCo-founder here. Sorry if the wording confuses you. Here's what we mean by HA: everything you deploy is natively spread out across multiple datacenters. That includes your frontend, workers and database. This is non-trivial stuff. Not to be confused with the usual bells and whistles of every PaaS under the sun, which we also offer - in all plans. Yes, we have a "mesh" which performs health checks on all your deployments, routes around network failures, re-deploys automatically on hardware failure, etc.
- tptacek 15y agoAdd a line-item over "HA" that every account has that brands the "bells and whistles every PaaS under the sun has", then write the "HA" feature to contrast with it.
- Periodic 15y agoThe current wording is causing us to focus on what the lower tier lack, and doesn't highlight what they have. For example, does it automatically load balance? Is there redundancy within the data center? For example, is a PHP+MySQL free plan equivalent to one $20 linode, or is it replicated databases and load balanced web servers across five systems?
- tptacek 15y agoRight, so they need a line for "best-in-class industry standard reliability measures like X Y and Z" that all accounts have, and then below it the extra bell and whistle that you can buy for "Enterprise" accounts.