Heroku: Commercial Launch (YC W08) (opens in new tab)

It is pretty as all heck. I'd be A/B testing it against a simpler one-click-and-done pricing scheme, though. I think geeks get a high off of complex pricing schemes like very few other people do, in particular, in a way that very few people who have the authority to sign off on a $3,500 a month ongoing cost do.

I mean, take the hourly cron option, for example. I'd be asking myself the question "Is having this standard feature on the pricing page, where the presence will probably not influence purchasing decisions but will make it one click longer to get through to entering payment details, going to make us more money at $3 per customer per month than it will cost us in lost conversions?"

You don't even have to make the pricing different -- just abuse the power of defaults and hide all the details on another page that 98% of your customers will never click through to. One enterprise plan: we assume you want the top DB, our recommended number of dynos, unlimited backups, and unlimited cronage. One SMB plan. One startup plan. One hobbyist plan. That takes it down from 6 or 7 layers of decision points, some of which are quite complicated and may be beyond the ability of the person actually making the decision, to a quick "What best describes the type of business you work for" check.

(Note that this may result in some large business customers overpaying for services out of a desire to not have to submit reimbursement requests for "Hobbyist" services. Aww shucks, right?)

yeah no kidding, I literally spent ~15 minutes just playing with it!

Pretty, but too dark to easily read.

impressive

Needs a better description of "dynos" than the help section gives. Also, what is a backup "bundle"? Finally, no mention of bandwidth, only storage. Are there any guarantees here?

They've since added a few other employees. I'd guess they have about 5 total. Still, very impressive.

From their "How It Works" section:

    "A dyno is roughly equivalent to a Mongrel, except that 
    dynos are spread across multiple servers, so 
    performance in most cases is greater.

    4 dynos are equivalent to the compute power of one 
    CPU-core on other systems."

A dyno is different from the common RAM+Bandwidth VPS slice, so it's difficult to make a comparison. (I'm going to do it anyway...) I would say that a 4 dyno machine, with everything else dialed down to the lowest value (so, free), you're roughly equivalent to Slicehost's 1024MB slice. (That's roughly $108/mo at Heroku, $70 at Slicehost.) You've got more storage space (so, the db can grow) on Slicehost, but you have to setup everything yourself, and adding power will take longer than a couple seconds.

It should be stressed that Heroku makes everything really simple. You can save a lot of time and energy if you've got the money to get started with Heroku up front.

I like setting up and tweaking a VPS, though. I haven't seen any benchmarks to show that Heroku with 4 dynos performs as well or better than 4 mongrels, or Apache + mod_rails on the 1024 slice, etc.

I think it's a bit expensive, but, man, it's really cool, too.