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This looks sleek, but I’ll ask the obvious question: Why use this over Heroku? I couldn’t find a good answer to that question from a quick look at the website,

This looks sleek, but I’ll ask the obvious question: Why use this over Heroku? I couldn’t find a good answer to that question from a quick look at the website, aside from maybe the fact that it uses AWS and Digital Ocean.

capableweb 5y ago
Heroku is a general apps platform. This seems to be tailored specifically to Django/Python (with the option of using your own Dockerfile so could deploy anything). One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku. If you're a Python-only shop, it might make more sense.
- vldo 5y ago
  having something that specific, tailored for dynamic language, seems like overkill i'd undestand if it was for something highly performant and hard to deploy
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Maybe, but maybe not. If you're using Python/JavaScript and have a ton of dependencies, most of your deploy-time is gonna be spent downloading dependencies. If the host you're using is specifically setup for Python/JavaScript, they can run a registry mirror with 100% of the packages right next to the host, and remove basically most time spent downloading the packages. Same goes for other time-consuming activities like code coverage or even running the tests. If the applications running on the platform are somewhat heterogeneous, then you can start doing really aggressive performance work.
- RussianCow 5y ago
  > One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku. No, I can’t imagine that. Why would performance be any different? I imagine most of these kinds of solutions use Docker behind the hood anyway, so they’re likely to be identical.
  - danielheath 5y ago
    Because Heroku is phenomenally expensive.
    - appliku 5y ago
      As i said in another comment Heroku is unbelievably expensive. What they offer for $250 per process can be done at $60/mo per whole app. When I helped them move all background workers and all non-production apps to Digital Ocean they ended up saving $7k/mo which blew my mind. It is easy to start on Heroku, but staying there is a black hole in any budget. Thankfully we've built Heroku Config Vars sync so one can move off of Heroku gradually.
      - fnomnom 5y ago
        >Heroku is unbelievably expensive. only if developer/devops/admin time is free and for most it isnt. if 60 vs 250 /month is a breaking factor for you and your use case: go for it. if you need the software deployed to make real business it just doesnt matter.
        appliku 5y ago
        $250/mo per process. And with appliku it is done automatically so there is no need for admin/devops time.
        capableweb 5y ago
        > if you need the software deployed to make real business it just doesnt matter No wonder AWS can get away with the prices they have since people like you (and many more VC funded startups) simply have zero care about the price. For people who run "real" businesses (meaning you need to have a larger income than expense [meaning, everything not VC-funded]), price is always a part of the calculations, even when it comes to hosting.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468943 To clarify, I mention "performance" in terms of the speed of "from commit to deploy", not the CPU/IO performance of an already deployed application.
vldo 5y ago
actually i'll ask something similar, why this over dokku?
- appliku 5y ago
  You can do Dokku, you can setup dokku and deploy apps with dokku. no problem. But I wanted a solution where I don't need to remember anything DevOps while writing/shipping my apps. I also added a generous free plan that allows all features. Then AWS has free credits so one can start their next big thing without expenses and not learning a single thing about deployment at all
appliku 5y ago
Price. It is easy to start on Heroku. With one app, one process. When you have multiple apps and several processes there is a way to reduce costs and not loose in convenience. $10/mo droplet can hold plenty of apps and it is still $10/mo. If you don't need a production grade Database – Appliku has them at 0 cost. Back in a day I moved several of my side projects to Heroku. I was happy until i received a $90+ invoice by the end of the month. Now a $10/mo droplet holds even more projects for me.
- eirki 5y ago
  This is my experience as well. $10 for each running process (server, worker, database) adds up very fast.
  - appliku 5y ago
    It doesn't seem like a lot when you enable one more resource for $7-10/mo. You can clearly see invoice "growth" when it adds app, right? :D
- RussianCow 5y ago
  Thanks for the response. My two cents: price is not the thing that I would compete on. For any "real" business, the cost of Heroku is negligible compared to its benefits; a few hundred dollars per month in savings is just not enough to convince most companies to migrate to a completely new service that isn't as battle tested and has fewer features. At the same time, I'm not convinced you could make any significant amount of money tailoring your service to side projects. With that said, I think you have a great product and could probably make some decent money by offering some combination of niche features. Ideas off the top of my head: * Integrated metrics. Since you're primarily targeting Django apps, it should be feasible to collect health/performance stats from the apps and display them in a simple dashboard. You don't need to offer very much here; most companies would be more than happy with basic stats related to response times per route, although SQL query times would be really neat to see. * Automatic scaling for your Python projects. If you could apply the same ease of deployment to horizontal scaling, that would be really valuable. * Easy integration with AWS services like S3, SES, and SNS. You could do this in a number of ways. One idea is to provide a set of Django libraries that, for instance, makes sending SMS messages super simple, with no configuration needed when used via Appliku. Or you could integrate with existing libraries and just remove the configuration step for the developer. With at least one of the above (or some other differentiator), I could see Appliku taking off. In any case, you have a great product, and I wish you the best of luck!
caymanjim 5y ago
Heroku is AWS.

capableweb 5y ago

Heroku is a general apps platform. This seems to be tailored specifically to Django/Python (with the option of using your own Dockerfile so could deploy anything). One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku. If you're a Python-only shop, it might make more sense.

vldo 5y ago
having something that specific, tailored for dynamic language, seems like overkill i'd undestand if it was for something highly performant and hard to deploy
- capableweb 5y ago
  Maybe, but maybe not. If you're using Python/JavaScript and have a ton of dependencies, most of your deploy-time is gonna be spent downloading dependencies. If the host you're using is specifically setup for Python/JavaScript, they can run a registry mirror with 100% of the packages right next to the host, and remove basically most time spent downloading the packages. Same goes for other time-consuming activities like code coverage or even running the tests. If the applications running on the platform are somewhat heterogeneous, then you can start doing really aggressive performance work.
RussianCow 5y ago
> One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku. No, I can’t imagine that. Why would performance be any different? I imagine most of these kinds of solutions use Docker behind the hood anyway, so they’re likely to be identical.
- danielheath 5y ago
  Because Heroku is phenomenally expensive.
  - appliku 5y ago
    As i said in another comment Heroku is unbelievably expensive. What they offer for $250 per process can be done at $60/mo per whole app. When I helped them move all background workers and all non-production apps to Digital Ocean they ended up saving $7k/mo which blew my mind. It is easy to start on Heroku, but staying there is a black hole in any budget. Thankfully we've built Heroku Config Vars sync so one can move off of Heroku gradually.
    - fnomnom 5y ago
      >Heroku is unbelievably expensive. only if developer/devops/admin time is free and for most it isnt. if 60 vs 250 /month is a breaking factor for you and your use case: go for it. if you need the software deployed to make real business it just doesnt matter.
      - appliku 5y ago
        $250/mo per process. And with appliku it is done automatically so there is no need for admin/devops time.
      - capableweb 5y ago
        > if you need the software deployed to make real business it just doesnt matter No wonder AWS can get away with the prices they have since people like you (and many more VC funded startups) simply have zero care about the price. For people who run "real" businesses (meaning you need to have a larger income than expense [meaning, everything not VC-funded]), price is always a part of the calculations, even when it comes to hosting.
- capableweb 5y ago
  See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28468943 To clarify, I mention "performance" in terms of the speed of "from commit to deploy", not the CPU/IO performance of an already deployed application.

vldo 5y ago

actually i'll ask something similar, why this over dokku?

appliku 5y ago
You can do Dokku, you can setup dokku and deploy apps with dokku. no problem. But I wanted a solution where I don't need to remember anything DevOps while writing/shipping my apps. I also added a generous free plan that allows all features. Then AWS has free credits so one can start their next big thing without expenses and not learning a single thing about deployment at all

appliku 5y ago

Price. It is easy to start on Heroku. With one app, one process. When you have multiple apps and several processes there is a way to reduce costs and not loose in convenience. $10/mo droplet can hold plenty of apps and it is still $10/mo. If you don't need a production grade Database – Appliku has them at 0 cost. Back in a day I moved several of my side projects to Heroku. I was happy until i received a $90+ invoice by the end of the month. Now a $10/mo droplet holds even more projects for me.

eirki 5y ago
This is my experience as well. $10 for each running process (server, worker, database) adds up very fast.
- appliku 5y ago
  It doesn't seem like a lot when you enable one more resource for $7-10/mo. You can clearly see invoice "growth" when it adds app, right? :D
RussianCow 5y ago
Thanks for the response. My two cents: price is not the thing that I would compete on. For any "real" business, the cost of Heroku is negligible compared to its benefits; a few hundred dollars per month in savings is just not enough to convince most companies to migrate to a completely new service that isn't as battle tested and has fewer features. At the same time, I'm not convinced you could make any significant amount of money tailoring your service to side projects. With that said, I think you have a great product and could probably make some decent money by offering some combination of niche features. Ideas off the top of my head: * Integrated metrics. Since you're primarily targeting Django apps, it should be feasible to collect health/performance stats from the apps and display them in a simple dashboard. You don't need to offer very much here; most companies would be more than happy with basic stats related to response times per route, although SQL query times would be really neat to see. * Automatic scaling for your Python projects. If you could apply the same ease of deployment to horizontal scaling, that would be really valuable. * Easy integration with AWS services like S3, SES, and SNS. You could do this in a number of ways. One idea is to provide a set of Django libraries that, for instance, makes sending SMS messages super simple, with no configuration needed when used via Appliku. Or you could integrate with existing libraries and just remove the configuration step for the developer. With at least one of the above (or some other differentiator), I could see Appliku taking off. In any case, you have a great product, and I wish you the best of luck!

caymanjim 5y ago

Heroku is AWS.