Appliku

Today was the point when 500 people trusted us with their deployments!

That's a massive milestone for Appliku.

Over the past 12 months, we have been working hard on the stability of the app, fixing bugs, and finally dedicating a noticeable amount of time to marketing: social media presence, sponsoring email newsletters, and SEO.

Also, we've been working on the https://speedpy.com Django SaaS template and https://findtalk.social - a tool to monitor Reddit posts.

Up until this point, Appliku only allowed Personal Projects, where only one developer could work on their apps and manage servers.

Appliku had customers that outgrew personal projects. They needed to invite their teams to work on projects together. Sharing login credentials between multiple people is a bad idea.

In early July the work was started on Team plans and it took a bit more than 2 months to roll out Team plans.

Team plans are also based on the number of servers and the number of team members is unlimited on all plans.

Release announcement: https://appliku.com/post/appliku-teams

In March 2019, I came up with the idea that I want to build a better deployment solution specifically for Django Projects.

While I was building it, I got distracted many times by other shiny things, looked at other players in PaaS space, and at some point lost my focus.

But a couple of months ago, I took a break from building the product and started heavily using it and talking to other people.

I realized the truth that building a general product for everyone means to build a product for nobody. How many times have I heard this? Only now I realized it.

I talked to people building PHP products and Ruby.

At some point, it came to my mind that I can't serve them well anyway because I am not experienced nor interested in that niche. That means I can't build a product that will appeal to them.

And finally, I got back to my original idea that I started from: Build the best deployment solution for Django Projects.

Here it is.

Also, we have a new logo and landing page with proper messaging.

https://appliku.com/

Yesterday I have published this story of Appliku on dev.to: https://dev.to/kostjapalovic/tired-of-deployments-built-my-own-heroku-47ed

It gave me very positive feedback and +10 new users.

I am pleasantly surprised by how this awesome community welcomed my post.

I did my best to make it about the story, not any kind of promotion.

With all the details about how it works and what pain I went through – it was very well received. I love developers!

During conversations with potential customers there was a question I heard multiple times:

• Great product, but does it support AWS or only Digital Ocean?

So today I am proud to announce that Appliku supports deployment to AWS EC2 instances.

There is a lot of work to be done in updating interface and onboarding, but the functionality is there and apps being deployed on AWS as simple as on Digital Ocean!

Big day for Appliku.
The first customer that hosted their first app on Digital Ocean with Appliku.

Despite the fact that I was very worried, deploying their apps went super smoothly with very little assistance from my side.

The reason to move was crazy spendings with Heroku.

Their app keeps using services from Heroku, but most of the dynos moved to Digital Ocean, saving them $300/mo

Happy to report that I consider Appliku feature-complete according to my initial roadmap from April 2019.

This release I've done today brings logs in the application Dashboard as well as Processes Stats from docker-compose logs command.

These features were the missing pieces of the fully observable application management that Appliku is aspiring to provide.

Join me in being happy with these features and try them yourself!
https://appliku.com/

Incredibly important update for Appliku users.

Back in a day, I have set out to make an app to make deploying Django apps easier. This was baked in my messaging and the codebase of Appliku.

This weekend I've worked on a relatively small code change, that brings significant change for the product.

Appliku supports any python app you might want to deploy.

Under the hood, it checks for the existence of manage.py before running "collectstatic" commands and migrations.

But not only that. It is now possible to DISABLE_COLLECTSTATIC=1 to disable it even if you are using Django.

Test on a minimal Flask app and works like a charm!

One year ago I understood what type of tool I need in my day to day work.

I needed a tool that will make me more productive in starting and maintaining Django apps.

The biggest pain point was the deployment process, especially a painful amount of initial effort that goes into the first deployment.

So the first year I've spent making deployment functionality.

This February I was somewhat satisfied with how it works and shared it with the public.

Then with all these global COVID19 related tragedy and isolation and everything I was too tired to think straight and lost my focus.

I forgot why exactly I have started https://Appliku.com .

This week I had a bit more time than usual and started talking to several people about Appliku.

I've made a new landing page and asked them for feedback.

Everyone was mostly happy with the design, thanks to https://unicornplatform.com .

But people were very confused by what exactly is Appliku and what I plan for the future, what features I plan to add.

"Will it support other languages? What about building the frontend part? What about running nodejs apps?"

"Is it hosting, reseller or something else?"

"What's the point of using Appliku if it is not a hosting?"

"What about scaling? Can it scale my app?"

"Wait, do I need to write code by myself?"

I became super sad, confused and generally got into all these thoughts.

I started thinking that I explain everything wrong.
If so, I need to understand who is my target audience. I had feature requests(more like questions, since I don't have users yet) that were conflicting with each other due to different types of audiences.

I took a day off of doing anything in front of my computer and started thinking. Something felt missing, something was completely off. But what?

By the evening, I realized: I have missed my focus.

I was comparing Appliku directly to Heroku. I thought about how to position Appliku in a way that it had benefits when compared to Heroku.

I quickly realized that those who already use Heroku are unlikely to move anywhere until they are ready to hire a DevOps department and go with EC2 or something.

Solo/Indie makers most of the time don't have money to pay for anything so they will probably do everything by themselves. Or they will because they lack skills and time to deploy apps themselves.

Maybe somebody with revenue will want to switch to Heroku, but it is risky to do and hard to convince them. If their app is making revenue, then you probably don't want to risk everything by screwing things up in this early stage.

Enterprises are out of the question here, because I know what goes into the sales process here. I am not ready to do all this.

I have spent the whole day thinking about it and finally recalled what was the initial idea: Help Python/Django developers in the way like no generic platform can possibly help.

Just like GitLab. You may have labeled it as a direct competitor to GitHub, but it is not. It is a platform that has so many useful stuff built-in, that it can't be compared to GitHub. Especially, when GitLab provides most of that stuff for free, but it is a different conversation.

So Appliku is not a deployment app. That's not the future, it is a core feature.

Right now, I am thinking of it this way:
Appliku is the all-in-one cloud platform for creating, running and managing Python/Django apps that help boost developers' productivity and run apps with cost-efficiency and flexible scaling.