6 ms·

What makes me most sad is that a really, really great product is being sucked into a company who has no reason to offer services to a person like me. Knowing I

What makes me most sad is that a really, really great product is being sucked into a company who has no reason to offer services to a person like me. Knowing I could spin up postgres for $18/month was pretty much the sweet spot that gave me the confidence to want to do more personal, outside of work projects. Heroku's $50/month offering is far too much. But I have a feeling that this acquisition, like many others, means the end of the offering of a product to the lone-wolf developer who wants to just build something for fun that won't scale nor make money. I have literally no reason whatsoever to believe IBM cares about the little guy but I'm okay and willing to be proven wrong about that. I want to be proven wrong about that. I don't want an email nor an empty promise. I honestly just want you guys to keep the name "compose" and keep that cheap postgres option open for the long run (years and years not weeks and weeks) so us folks who just want to build something for fun have a quality database with a professional operation to support it at the great pricing it is today.

detaro 11y ago
IBM already has some "lone developer" friendly offerings in bluemix, so there is hope
splatcollision 11y ago
Just get yourself a free Bluemix account, add the compose DB services when they become available (and they will), and if your usage is on that hobbyist level, you'll only pay what you're paying now. You don't even have to use Bluemix itself for runtime hosting, you can access most Bluemix services from your localhost or other app environments.
- justincormack 11y ago
  "pretend to sign up to our other services so it looks like IBM is attracting new business and you can continue to use this service for free"
mrkurt 11y ago
This is important to us, and was a factor in our decision to go to IBM (which is a little counter intuitive, given IBM's history). Our entire sales model is predicated on people being able to start easily, and grow if they need to. Price, self service-ness, and the content we produce are all important in this model. The thing about lone wolf developers, and side projects, and one off things people hack together over the weekend is that they sometimes "flip" and become big customers. That's when we win, and we monitor our funnel like crazy and continuously see that it's working. Interestingly, some of the bad customer experiences you see in this thread are the direct result of this model. We aren't very good at handling one offs, or doing things by hand, or consulting, because we focus so much on repeatable, self service offerings — which have to work for small applications. IBM is interested in three things from us. The technology is good, the team is great, and the way we sell to customers is something they have told us they firmly believe is the future of selling tools to developers. There's a really, really good chance that you'll see other parts of IBM acting like us (and building things for you) before you see us becoming all enterprisey. We'll keep the name Compose (because it's fabulous!), we'll keep the cheap Postgres option, and we'll do our best to keep that true for years and years. For what it's worth, I greatly appreciate your comment.
- crb 11y ago
  Will this change the platforms you target? I'd love to see your services running on Google Cloud Platform, for example, so that they could be used with co-located customer services.
  - mrkurt 11y ago
    We'll target more. We should have a good GCE option soon.
    - campers 11y ago
      Good to hear, a managed PostgreSQL service is the one big thing missing on GCE for me.
joshburgess 11y ago
Have you tried Bluemix? It's actually pretty awesome.
- yellowapple 11y ago
  I hadn't heard of Bluemix prior to this thread. It does indeed look awesome; the free tiers are pretty impressive, and going beyond that is surprisingly affordable. Definitely a stark contrast from a lot of other PaaS providers (in particular, Heroku). I'll have to check it out for some of my own pet projects.
  - juliangregorian 11y ago
    Bluemix has a big opportunity here as Heroku has been aggressively kicking out freeloaders lately. My company pays Heroku a lot of money in large part because the developers know how to work with it, but I won't use it for any of my personal play stuff anymore.
    - johnward 11y ago
      I'm not certain but I do not believe bluemix has a long-term free tier. It expires after a significant trial period from what I can tell. Is that not what people are upset at Heroku over?
      - nowey 11y ago
        there's free allowances https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/ https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/
      - juliangregorian 11y ago
        Nope, Heroku had a free tier that wasn't a trial, all kinds of people were using it for toys and experiments, some of them evolved into Serious Business projects with real costs, but a lot of them just idled along using minimal resources, but then Heroku decided the free lunchers were no longer welcome and severely throttled the free tier so that most of them now had to pay $7/mo. This took effect earlier this month. This was right on the heels of discontinuing their old stack, and apps that were running on it weren't auto-migrated or anything, just killed. So there's a lot of disgruntled former Heroku users out there. I'm not using it yet but Bluemix does appear to have a non-trial free tier, and it looks like they actually offer a fair bit more than Heroku did.
kocolosk 11y ago
IBM actually "cares about the little guy" to an incredible degree these days. The last few years have seen a major shift in buying trends in the enterprise that puts developers in a position of significant influence. We know that if those individual devs have a chance to experiment with technologies as hobbyists and have a positive experience they'll be much more likely to recommend them for the next internal corporate project. Bluemix is the best example of our commitment to this space and the Compose services are a natural complement to that PaaS environment.
omni 11y ago
Just so you know, AWS RDS has Postgres instances starting at $13/mo hourly, or as low as $9.25/mo if you pay up front for a 1 year reservation.
- keithblaha 11y ago
  It's also eligible for their free tier, making a micro instance (more than enough for most personal projects) free for a year with a new account
dmead 11y ago
this is totally true. IBM isn't really a technology company anymore. they're in the business of buying and selling smaller services companies. also expect compose to be totally different after about a year (source: i've worked for a company that was aquired by IBM)
- ectoplasm 11y ago
  I don't know... IBM is really really big. Even if 20% of the company is technology-focused, that's still a huge number of people. They supply the finance and defense world with machines, operating systems, and compilers and they also provide support for them. They also have a research division that routinely publishes at all of the top conferences.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    There's no question. A company builds some cloudy offerings with a few million and HN calls them a technology company. IBM's internal use alone is almost a billion a year of their technology. Then they sell billions to others. So, yeah, they're a technology company. And anyone challenging them, their government connections, and patent portfolio better remember that.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  IBM is both a technology company and a services company. They shifted their primary strategy to services when they saw it doing well while eg server markets weren't. Right now, they make billions selling mainframes, servers, and software licenses. They also hit 7nm in the lab recently while Intel struggles with lesser tech. Their R&D is several billion dollars a year ranging from product development to foundational science. They're more of a technology company than most that make Hacker News. They also sell services. They also acquire proven implementations of new products and services. The combo is called a technology conglomerate & it's a proven model to make billions over decades.
mark_l_watson 11y ago
IBM's Bluemix has generous free use tiers for deploying small scale apps.
tlogan 11y ago
I liked what Compose was doing and I was one of early adopters. And I also 100% agree with their move (congrats!!). As bootstrapped founder, I can tell you that customers who pay less than $30/month are just trouble. These users can used as early adopters and promotes - but not to grow the business. After company gains attraction these users should be dumped. This is unfortunate story but that is status of SaaS: this kinda explains that there is very little new B2C SaaS startup. Actually my thinking that for SaaS any offering with price under $30/month should be free tier and I think IBM will give your tier for free.

detaro 11y ago

IBM already has some "lone developer" friendly offerings in bluemix, so there is hope

splatcollision 11y ago

Just get yourself a free Bluemix account, add the compose DB services when they become available (and they will), and if your usage is on that hobbyist level, you'll only pay what you're paying now. You don't even have to use Bluemix itself for runtime hosting, you can access most Bluemix services from your localhost or other app environments.

justincormack 11y ago
"pretend to sign up to our other services so it looks like IBM is attracting new business and you can continue to use this service for free"

mrkurt 11y ago

This is important to us, and was a factor in our decision to go to IBM (which is a little counter intuitive, given IBM's history). Our entire sales model is predicated on people being able to start easily, and grow if they need to. Price, self service-ness, and the content we produce are all important in this model. The thing about lone wolf developers, and side projects, and one off things people hack together over the weekend is that they sometimes "flip" and become big customers. That's when we win, and we monitor our funnel like crazy and continuously see that it's working. Interestingly, some of the bad customer experiences you see in this thread are the direct result of this model. We aren't very good at handling one offs, or doing things by hand, or consulting, because we focus so much on repeatable, self service offerings — which have to work for small applications. IBM is interested in three things from us. The technology is good, the team is great, and the way we sell to customers is something they have told us they firmly believe is the future of selling tools to developers. There's a really, really good chance that you'll see other parts of IBM acting like us (and building things for you) before you see us becoming all enterprisey. We'll keep the name Compose (because it's fabulous!), we'll keep the cheap Postgres option, and we'll do our best to keep that true for years and years. For what it's worth, I greatly appreciate your comment.

crb 11y ago
Will this change the platforms you target? I'd love to see your services running on Google Cloud Platform, for example, so that they could be used with co-located customer services.
- mrkurt 11y ago
  We'll target more. We should have a good GCE option soon.
  - campers 11y ago
    Good to hear, a managed PostgreSQL service is the one big thing missing on GCE for me.

joshburgess 11y ago

Have you tried Bluemix? It's actually pretty awesome.

yellowapple 11y ago
I hadn't heard of Bluemix prior to this thread. It does indeed look awesome; the free tiers are pretty impressive, and going beyond that is surprisingly affordable. Definitely a stark contrast from a lot of other PaaS providers (in particular, Heroku). I'll have to check it out for some of my own pet projects.
- juliangregorian 11y ago
  Bluemix has a big opportunity here as Heroku has been aggressively kicking out freeloaders lately. My company pays Heroku a lot of money in large part because the developers know how to work with it, but I won't use it for any of my personal play stuff anymore.
  - johnward 11y ago
    I'm not certain but I do not believe bluemix has a long-term free tier. It expires after a significant trial period from what I can tell. Is that not what people are upset at Heroku over?
    - nowey 11y ago
      there's free allowances https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/ https://console.ng.bluemix.net/pricing/
    - juliangregorian 11y ago
      Nope, Heroku had a free tier that wasn't a trial, all kinds of people were using it for toys and experiments, some of them evolved into Serious Business projects with real costs, but a lot of them just idled along using minimal resources, but then Heroku decided the free lunchers were no longer welcome and severely throttled the free tier so that most of them now had to pay $7/mo. This took effect earlier this month. This was right on the heels of discontinuing their old stack, and apps that were running on it weren't auto-migrated or anything, just killed. So there's a lot of disgruntled former Heroku users out there. I'm not using it yet but Bluemix does appear to have a non-trial free tier, and it looks like they actually offer a fair bit more than Heroku did.

kocolosk 11y ago

IBM actually "cares about the little guy" to an incredible degree these days. The last few years have seen a major shift in buying trends in the enterprise that puts developers in a position of significant influence. We know that if those individual devs have a chance to experiment with technologies as hobbyists and have a positive experience they'll be much more likely to recommend them for the next internal corporate project. Bluemix is the best example of our commitment to this space and the Compose services are a natural complement to that PaaS environment.

omni 11y ago

Just so you know, AWS RDS has Postgres instances starting at $13/mo hourly, or as low as $9.25/mo if you pay up front for a 1 year reservation.

keithblaha 11y ago
It's also eligible for their free tier, making a micro instance (more than enough for most personal projects) free for a year with a new account

dmead 11y ago

this is totally true. IBM isn't really a technology company anymore. they're in the business of buying and selling smaller services companies. also expect compose to be totally different after about a year (source: i've worked for a company that was aquired by IBM)

ectoplasm 11y ago
I don't know... IBM is really really big. Even if 20% of the company is technology-focused, that's still a huge number of people. They supply the finance and defense world with machines, operating systems, and compilers and they also provide support for them. They also have a research division that routinely publishes at all of the top conferences.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  There's no question. A company builds some cloudy offerings with a few million and HN calls them a technology company. IBM's internal use alone is almost a billion a year of their technology. Then they sell billions to others. So, yeah, they're a technology company. And anyone challenging them, their government connections, and patent portfolio better remember that.
nickpsecurity 11y ago
IBM is both a technology company and a services company. They shifted their primary strategy to services when they saw it doing well while eg server markets weren't. Right now, they make billions selling mainframes, servers, and software licenses. They also hit 7nm in the lab recently while Intel struggles with lesser tech. Their R&D is several billion dollars a year ranging from product development to foundational science. They're more of a technology company than most that make Hacker News. They also sell services. They also acquire proven implementations of new products and services. The combo is called a technology conglomerate & it's a proven model to make billions over decades.

mark_l_watson 11y ago

IBM's Bluemix has generous free use tiers for deploying small scale apps.

tlogan 11y ago

I liked what Compose was doing and I was one of early adopters. And I also 100% agree with their move (congrats!!). As bootstrapped founder, I can tell you that customers who pay less than $30/month are just trouble. These users can used as early adopters and promotes - but not to grow the business. After company gains attraction these users should be dumped. This is unfortunate story but that is status of SaaS: this kinda explains that there is very little new B2C SaaS startup. Actually my thinking that for SaaS any offering with price under $30/month should be free tier and I think IBM will give your tier for free.