[minouye]

These "Heroku is too expensive" comments all look at absolute costs and not relative costs. They are paying roughly $200 a month to Heroku. If you do some rough calculations to figure out revenue (use Stripe fees and make assumptions about yearly/monthly plan breakdown) you can reasonably estimate about $3,000 in monthly billings. The incremental savings couldn't possibly outweigh the time costs of switching to another provider.

If using Digital Ocean allows them to move faster, then sure that makes more sense. But doubt that's true in this case.

[vonklaus]

I used to say "but we could just build that", but I agree with you.

Some of the things I find expensive are te SSL line items and more peculiar than expensive really, a $25 image carousel.

If letsencrypt could be a drop in replacement for te SSL spend it would save them some money.

Other than that, I don't use Heroku, but not wanted to manage a db is pretty reasonable and the cost offset is likely there.

Sometimes these startups are 2 people. So the tech cycle would be hard enough, not to mention business and customer support.

[destroytoday]

For some insight, the $25 carousel was more about supporting the indie dev who built it. :) And sometimes the startup is 1 person, which Cushion currently is. I'm hoping to hire some dev help this year, though!

[sleepyhead]

How much time would it take to code a carousel? How long time does it take to look through the countless open source carousels? How likely is it that this $25 carousel is better than the free ones? Come on, it's peanuts if it's a good lib even though it's a fairly standard feature.

I would off course never use a carousel though.