Help Meteor survive. Become a Meteorista!

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As a regular reader of this forum and user of Meteor for two years, I’ve noticed an increasing amount of paranoia/gloom-and-doom regarding Meteor over the past year. From my perspective, I think the move from free hosting to Galaxy, combined with the shift in emphasis from Blaze to React and the emergence of Apollo as a development priority have left community members wondering about the future of Meteor.

It occurs to me that if you care about the future of Meteor, there is a simple way to show your support, give your opinions more meaning, and collectively improve Meteor’s long-term prospects: spend just a little money for Galaxy hosting as your way of providing financial support to Meteor.

Meteor has 36K stars on GitHub. Let’s say a 1,000 of us sign up for Galaxy and spend, say, $10/month starting in 2017 (make it a test deployment service or something, monitor your usage, and cap your spending at $120/year). View it as your personal investment in the future of Meteor with the side-effect of actually providing you with some development benefits. That’s a bump of $120K in income for MDG right there. Not enough, but a start.

Let’s call these folks “Meteoristas”: they recognize the reality that MDG needs income to develop Meteor, and that the developer base is big enough that, working together, we can each contribute a relatively small amount but the impact in aggregate can be significant. Maybe there’s only 1,000 of us next year, but if there are 10,000 of us in three years, it’s real money.

Looking at my records, I’ve only spent about $20 on Galaxy hosting in 2016. That’s pathetic. I am hereby making a public commitment to spend $120 on Galaxy hosting in 2017 (I give that much to my local public radio station, and Meteor is similarly important to me).

If you want to join me in the initial cohort of Meteoristas, just ‘like’ this posting (and silently promise to spend an average of $10/month on Galaxy next year.)

Philip

p.s. I have no affiliation with MDG and they did not put me up to this.

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I admire the sentiment, and I think those of us that get real value from Meteor often do so at zero cost.

However, at the very least, Galaxy should be competitive. Currently, standard Galaxy hosting ($0.08 / hr for 1gb ram) is 5.3 times more expensive than a comparable Digital Ocean droplet ($0.015 / hr for 1 gb ram). I know Galaxy provides more tools and features than Digital Ocean, (PAAS vs IAAS) but at the level I’m talking about, I can use mup and provide similar value to my customers at a fifth of the cost.

The 10 quid a month from us, even with the best of intentions, would be a drop in the bucket compared to one successful enterprise customer on a competitive Galaxy deployment.

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agree - not our place or business to deal with mdg’s pricing decisions. focus on building good apps and making money to pay for it. work on getting best value to your clients. the rest will take care of itself. if part of this is using meteor and mdg’s hosting solution, good for you and galaxy.

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@philipmjohnson MDG raised $20M in 2015, if they are not able to find their business model within 2 years, the are dead.
I don’t know what their burn rate is, but imho 120K won’t be enough to sustain the business.
you are not MDG target customer, they seems to focus on big company using AWS for nodejs/meteor/apollo development able to spend $1000 per month.
I need 24h/7d for my projects = 115$ / month on galaxy, too expensive as @aido179 said.
Just be patient and wait the community based meteor to donate $10/month.

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I’m already spending $120/month on Galaxy. @aido179 is right that the current pricing is too high for the long tail of thousands of low-traffic sites. OTOH it’s proven to be highly available, dead-easy to operate and deploy-to meaning that I don’t need devOps staff. That does however mean that Galaxy needs to operate in the “Goldilocks” zone of “just the right functionality and price for just the right customer.” Big customers that are naturally going to have a devOps or ops team are also going to want something cheaper at 100 node + scale.

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Hey thanks for the sentiment - I appreciate that you’re excited about giving back and helping our company stay healthy! I think there many great ways to help out with Meteor, if you have the time:

  1. Post blog posts or other content when Meteor helps you out
  2. Contribute to better documentation, guides, and tutorials
  3. Contribute to conversations about issues on GitHub and help triage them: Community help with issue triage
  4. Contribute fixes to issues

That will help us and the whole community much more than $120 a month, if you just spend one or two hours a week doing some of the above.

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