My first reaction was also that the $129 price tag seems steep, but then I started doing the math: My guess is that if you want to go with EC2 on your own that

My first reaction was also that the $129 price tag seems steep, but then I started doing the math: My guess is that if you want to go with EC2 on your own that it's approximately $50 per month cheaper than Solo (see http://tinyurl.com/2q4e3t http://tinyurl.com/2q4e3t for the AWS EC2 cost calculator). However, my guess is that there is a significant number of of Rails hackers who would be better off spending those extra $50 to get going right away instead of messing around themselves trying to configure their EC2 instance. Ezra mentions a lot of details in his introduction video on the EY site, such as a hardened and and pre-compiled nix packages (cough* rmagick), optimizing MySQL memory usage etc, knowledge they have built-up over the years within EY. Their knowledge is worth money. The only problem I foresee for EY's Solo is that the 'end result' of an EC instance deployed by Solo is easily copied. All the knowledge poured into the configs are accessible by anyone with root access to the instance, and nothing prevents you from deploying the next instance completely yourself. But if the configuration management tools of Solo (and upcoming Flex) seriously rock than I doubt that this will be an attractive option.