Got featured on BetaList
by Kostja PalovićA couple of months of waiting after submitting to BetaList, Appliku.com became featured on BetaList.
https://betalist.com/startups/appliku
This is the first time Appliku got featured anywhere, will post about traffic and registrations when I have the data!
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Great job! Let us know if the feature returned any conversations!
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BetaList visitors yesterday: 34
IH visitors yesterday: 40
well... not much at all. But it was Sunday.
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Congratulations!. Good luck
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Hi Kostja,
I'm using Django right now hosted on GCP. it's costing me around 9 Euros a month. The cost comes mostly from the SQL database. I can deploy with a single command and the app instance scales up and down depending on the traffic.If I'm moving to your service, I'd have to pay 9 euros + 5 euros for the droplet.
Maybe I'm missing the point, but why would you say it'd be better for me to move to your service?-
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First of all, I am happy to learn more about your setup, that's super interesting.
If it works for you - I'd say go for it. Evidently, at this stage, it seems to be great and no point in changing anything.
Appliku's selling point is convenience. When you are skilled enough, you can host on GCP or EC2 and get away with pretty nice prices.
I can deploy everything manually as well. But I don't want to do it. I don't want to write configs, run a command to deploy the app, I want to add DB or change configs from the interface. I don't even want to touch Nginx configs and SSL certs – all this can be automated and that's the idea behind Appliku.
Recently, I needed to set up 5 apps really quickly, moving them partially from Heroku. It was done in 20 minutes, including the process of deciding which workers we needed to move to Digital Ocean.
Was it possible to do it manually? Yes. Would it be faster? Definitely no.
As for hosting prices – the Digital Ocean was chosen as a first cloud provider because of its popularity. There are plans for adding other providers in the future. And their pricing can be different.
At your level of cloud provider spendings, I don't think there is any reason to move anywhere – you would spend more time.
When you need to scale, add more apps and maintaining control over your infrastructure – then you definitely should give Appliku a try.
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Thanks @kpalovic. I understand your value.
I have the following questions:
- Is this using containers under the hood or are the apps deployed directly on top of the droplet?
- how do you handle database migrations and (in general post install commands) ?
- is the database hosted on the same droplet ? is there a regular backup?
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- Docker containers
- Appliku uses Procfile (like heroku) and it has "release" command that is executed during the deployment. You can specify command to be executed. Or you can choose to disable it in Build Settings for each app.
- Currently database is hosted on same droplet. I chose this way for now, since I am not ready to fight in the niche of Production Grade DBs offer by Heroku, Digital Ocean and others. This is the fight for another day. Regarding backups – not yet. Backups are automatically turned on for the droplet on D.O. side. I've got plans to have backups. DBs docker volumes will be backed up on a D.O. Space. That's the high-level plan for this functionality, but I have no date for this right now.
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It makes sense!
I think if you can make a cli version of your tool, open source or one time payment, you can really become some sort of standard, then monetize subscription-based the dashboard, monitoring features, backups etc
Deploying Django apps on Digital Ocean is a lot of constellations to align. However both are used a lot by indiehackers and go through the pain and end up with some sort of variant of the setup.
I don't like doing it and we all take shortcuts to either save money or time. If your tool focuses on being the most simple, secure and best practice fed tool, I'd buy it instantly.
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Congrats. Does featuring there help you with your traffic or conversion?
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I just gave it a like 👍
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Congrats =)
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Thanks!
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