4 ms·

From their presentation, they went from $7500/m to $500/m

ttul 2y ago
I mean, $7,000 a month isn’t nothing. But it’s not a lot. Certainly not enough to justify a seven month engineering effort plus infinite ongoing maintenance.
- crdrost 2y ago
  The main engineering effort to reduce by that much was completed in 6 weeks according to their YouTube video. 7 months is presumably more like “the time it has been stable for” or so, although I am not sure the dates line up for that 100%. Also cost reduction was apparently not the main impetus, GDPR compliance was.
  - ttul 2y ago
    That “main engineering effort” will go on forever. People neglect to note that everything is constantly changing. Just like the roof on your house, if you don’t upgrade your components regularly, eventually you will face a huge rewrite when that thing your ancient home-made infrastructure relies on is no longer supported or is no longer updated to support the latest thing you need for your SaaS. You can’t avoid this cost. Some people refer to it as technical debt, but I think more accurately it could be called “infrastructure debt”. Platform providers maintain the infrastructure debt for you - this is what you pay them for. And they do it with tremendous economies of scale. Unless your scale is truly enormous - like Meta, for instance - it isn’t worth build your own infrastructure.
- nine_k 2y ago
  This is $7k/mo today. If they are actively growing, and their demand for compute is slated to grow 5x or even 10x in a year, they wanted to get off Heroku fast.
- ramshorst 2y ago
  Would you say one person not working 100% of the time is also quite minor? ;)
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    Sure. We have around 10 of those. It’s a significant boon to the project for them to do nothing.
grogenaut 2y ago
assume a dev is $100k/year... so $200k with taxes, benes, etc. That's 16,666/month, at 1.5 months is 25k. So it'll take 3.5 months to break even. And they'd save around .8 of their pay, or .4 of their total cost a year... Generally I am hoping my devs are working a good multiplier to their pay for revenue they generate. Not sure I'd use them this way if there was other things to do. That said sounds like it was mainly for GDPR so.
- p_l 2y ago
  Now consider that some places are not in Silly Valley, or not even in USA, and the fully loaded cost of engineer (who, once done with on-prem or at least more "owned" stack, can take on other problems) can be way, way lower
  - grogenaut 2y ago
    These numbers are actually WAY LOW for silicon valley. If I was doing the ROI for an Amazon employee I'd start with around 350 for an SDE all told for entry level and half a mill for one with a few years experience. But they're also way high for other places. And just right. The point is how to do the math not the ballpark. Also that even at 100k for a dev it's maybe a wash depending on your time horizon.
    - p_l 2y ago
      My experience is that a lot of "simpler alternatives" ballooned costs beyond cost of someone to wrangle the more complex solution - and well, after initial pains, the workload drops so you can have them tackle other problems if not at full time. Or as I said it few times at meetups, Heroku is what I use when I want to go bankrupt (that was before Heroku got sold)
- icameron 2y ago
  Where are you finding capable DevOps engineers for 100k total comp? It’s hard to find someone with the skills to rebuild a SaaS production stack who’s willing to work for that little around here!
dbackeus 2y ago
We've since migrated more stuff. We're currently saving more than $400k/year.

ttul 2y ago

I mean, $7,000 a month isn’t nothing. But it’s not a lot. Certainly not enough to justify a seven month engineering effort plus infinite ongoing maintenance.

crdrost 2y ago
The main engineering effort to reduce by that much was completed in 6 weeks according to their YouTube video. 7 months is presumably more like “the time it has been stable for” or so, although I am not sure the dates line up for that 100%. Also cost reduction was apparently not the main impetus, GDPR compliance was.
- ttul 2y ago
  That “main engineering effort” will go on forever. People neglect to note that everything is constantly changing. Just like the roof on your house, if you don’t upgrade your components regularly, eventually you will face a huge rewrite when that thing your ancient home-made infrastructure relies on is no longer supported or is no longer updated to support the latest thing you need for your SaaS. You can’t avoid this cost. Some people refer to it as technical debt, but I think more accurately it could be called “infrastructure debt”. Platform providers maintain the infrastructure debt for you - this is what you pay them for. And they do it with tremendous economies of scale. Unless your scale is truly enormous - like Meta, for instance - it isn’t worth build your own infrastructure.
nine_k 2y ago
This is $7k/mo today. If they are actively growing, and their demand for compute is slated to grow 5x or even 10x in a year, they wanted to get off Heroku fast.
ramshorst 2y ago
Would you say one person not working 100% of the time is also quite minor? ;)
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Sure. We have around 10 of those. It’s a significant boon to the project for them to do nothing.

grogenaut 2y ago

assume a dev is $100k/year... so $200k with taxes, benes, etc. That's 16,666/month, at 1.5 months is 25k. So it'll take 3.5 months to break even. And they'd save around .8 of their pay, or .4 of their total cost a year... Generally I am hoping my devs are working a good multiplier to their pay for revenue they generate. Not sure I'd use them this way if there was other things to do. That said sounds like it was mainly for GDPR so.

p_l 2y ago
Now consider that some places are not in Silly Valley, or not even in USA, and the fully loaded cost of engineer (who, once done with on-prem or at least more "owned" stack, can take on other problems) can be way, way lower
- grogenaut 2y ago
  These numbers are actually WAY LOW for silicon valley. If I was doing the ROI for an Amazon employee I'd start with around 350 for an SDE all told for entry level and half a mill for one with a few years experience. But they're also way high for other places. And just right. The point is how to do the math not the ballpark. Also that even at 100k for a dev it's maybe a wash depending on your time horizon.
  - p_l 2y ago
    My experience is that a lot of "simpler alternatives" ballooned costs beyond cost of someone to wrangle the more complex solution - and well, after initial pains, the workload drops so you can have them tackle other problems if not at full time. Or as I said it few times at meetups, Heroku is what I use when I want to go bankrupt (that was before Heroku got sold)
icameron 2y ago
Where are you finding capable DevOps engineers for 100k total comp? It’s hard to find someone with the skills to rebuild a SaaS production stack who’s willing to work for that little around here!

dbackeus 2y ago

We've since migrated more stuff. We're currently saving more than $400k/year.