Infrastructure teck stack for SAAS app?
I mainly looking for something cheap that scales well as the app (ever) grows. So here are some thoughts:
- AWS. can be complex to setup + expensive.
- Firebase. Super easy to get started but has two main cons: it encourages you to use a pattern (DB calls in the browser) that basically locks you in. Plus it's expensive once the app gets popular
- Heroku. Super easy to get started. I seem to recall from a previous startup that it can get pricey. However, it's not hard to migrate to something else.
I would jump on Heroku but it's 2018 and was wondering if there were better alternatives. Basically, something easy, and relatively cheap enough so that it makes sense to use for a while... if that exists.
then pick a $5 Digital Ocean droplet and scale up when you have to. Don’t over think the hammer you’re going to use. Spend time thinking about what house to build instead.
+1 for this. Check out Dokku. You can deploy the one-click install on Digital Ocean if you want a simple PaaS that's cheaper than Heroku.
try nanobox or cloud66 on top of Linode or Digital Ocean
Is your goal purely to do what's best for getting the app shipped quickly and control costs as it scales? Or are you looking to add some keywords to your resume?
If it's the latter go for AWS, if not, then stay far away. Personally, I'd lean toward's @wbright91's suggestion.
We've been through all these solutions and ended up hosting Ambissues on DigitalOcean, which is (at least for us) the best combination of price/easy to get started.
However, it depends on what you need from the cloud. E.g. if you need Machine Learning and GPUs, Microsoft Azure may be cheaper than Amazon or Google (<- not even sure if this is true, don't take it for granted, it's just an example).
My default would be Firebase (Firestore for the database, to be precise).
Your biggest problem is finding product-market fit. The faster you can implement your SaaS, the faster you find out if you have (or don't have) product-market fit.
"Expensive when popular" is a non-issue if you have a business plan.
As an indie dev you should not even be trying to build businesses where revenue wouldn't cover cost of Firebase services.
Even few users at $10/month would pay for a lot of Firebase services.
Nanobox is super cool. Netlify for fronted. RDS for database
Try Hatchbox.io if you’re on Rails
Use AWS with lambdas... configure and deploy all the things with CloudFormation. That is super easy. This will also allow you to price based on customer usage super easily because you can use API Gateway's API Keys and set up billing directly.
Also, by the time you account for ALL of the costs associated with everything else (droplets, load balancers, etc etc etc etc) you wind up about at the same cost of AWS /w Lambdas, IF lambdas were constantly running... which very likely won't be the case for new companies/projects.
https://www.slideshare.net/TimWagner/serverlessconf-2018-keynote-debunking-serverless-myths
This is really important for SaaS models and is very hard to implement by yourself. AWS does it for you: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/latest/developerguide/api-gateway-api-usage-plans.html
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
Why would Heroku require more thinking? Heroku + Postgres couldn't really be much easier. With your own setup, you have to deal with security updates and load balancers yourself, plus come up with your own process for doing zero downtime deployments, rollbacks, staging environments etc.
This comment was deleted 7 years ago