undefined | Better HN

0 pointstjpd9y ago0 comments

I disagree with this wholeheartedly and just posted why above but wanted to reiterate it here. This might just have been a throw-away comment but "bloat", lock-in & cost are red-herrings.

"Bloat" here is a virtue. Heroku removes two levels of drudgery and administration between you and the hardware. Who wants to be racking hardware? Who wants to be patching the OS? Who wants to be dealing with package vulnerabilities? None of this helps actually build the business

Lock-in is minimal, particularly if it's a self contained app and you're not using a lot of services. There are countless examples of companies who've moved off of Heroku when they've gotten big. Plus there's also lock-in using EC2, S3, AWS. There's lock-in of some level regardless where you run your stuff.

Future cost is also really, very very low because P(success) is, sadly, super low.

0 comments

5 comments · 2 top-level

idlewords9y ago· 2 in thread

Built in to your comment is the assumption that you're trying to grow your business big or die.

If you're working in a niche market, costs are important and keeping them low can be the difference between having an independent livelihood and failure.

tjpdOP9y ago

No it's not, it's really not. In fact I think in a niche market then it's often even more true.

If you're building in a niche then (almost by definition) you're not going to need a lot of infrastructure. There won't be millions of customers and they (usually) won't need tons of infrastructure.

I think the only case is where you're building a business like Pinboard :) Where the CLTV is relatively low but the the bandwidth, storage & compute is relatively high.

Regardless of the market you're in though, if you want to build an independent livelihood or a lifestyle business typically infrastructure costs still shouldn't be a factor.

A good livelihood might be $50k/yr say or $4k/mo roughly. The difference between $5/mo and $500/mo in hosting costs isn't what determines success or failure. It's whether or not you've built, marketed and sold an app to 5 or 500 customers.

sokoloff9y ago

I agree with your overall sentiment I think, but there are many side gigs where $5 vs $500 a month is the difference between viable and not viable. Sometimes it's the difference between sticking with an idea long enough to turn it into something viable; something that's bleeding you $500/mo won't have as long a life as something that's only $5 or $25/mo while you're figuring out if there's something worthwhile or not.

A niche market cuts both ways. Sometimes you don't need to worry about scale, but you also can't bet on large numbers of customers coming to cover up inefficient choices.

hiphopyo9y ago· 1 in thread

> Who wants to be patching the OS? Who wants to be dealing with package vulnerabilities?

Choose OpenBSD (and don't install stupid stuff like bash) and you won't have to deal with any of that.

viraptor9y ago

No system is immune. Everything needs to be patched. https://www.openbsd.org/errata60.html

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse