[spicybright]

It's honestly strange how no one has eaten their lunch yet. Besides the extra services they now offer (which you aren't required for hosting a simple app), you could probably have a team bang out the basics in a few months.

You could even just be a layer on top of AWS and probably make profit from not many users, as long as you're cheaper.

[jacobsenscott]

There are a lot of startups that have banged out the basics in a few months. The are getting mentioned all over in the threads under this article. But the basics aren't good enough. Heroku looks simple, but does a lot, and pretty much does it all right. Their documentation alone is amazing and it would take more than a few months to create docs of the same quality.

[rsanheim]

Yuuup. That is the genius of Heroku. They make almost everything very simple and the tougher stuff relatively easy to understand and configure. All of that took many many years of iteration and refinement, which is why the competitors are going to take awhile to get there.

[mixedCase]

> You could even just be a layer on top of AWS and probably make profit from not many users, as long as you're cheaper.

Isn't Heroku exactly that?