I would disagree pretty strongly with that. My wife sells eBooks on Amazon as an indie published author. Free book downloaders rarely turn into paying customers in the end. There is a reason heroku and other platforms aren’t offering a true free tier anymore.
6 Likes
Agreed. It’s been a great experience on many levels. Much love to MDG for providing the service these past few years. Looking forward to converting everything to Galaxy.
7 Likes
I do agree, my fathers an author and I’ve worked in sales before, neither of us found much luck in converting from free.
The difference here is that the free meteor service was already running and MDG had made the decision to shut it down. Yes it shouldn’t be the purpose of the free hosting to try and convert, but it was an opportunity to convert whilst they wind down the service.
2 Likes
Would be cool if Galaxy allows us to deploy dev-apps which shut down automatically when there is no activity, they can also charge us for the seconds when these apps run 
6 Likes
Sure send me ideas on how you’d like to see this happen!
1 Like
Agreed. I have a lot of package demos on meteor.com which are just for the community, and don’t feel like paying $$ per month on my own dime to maintain them.
I think the lack of free hosting for package authors will have a chilling effect on well maintained and readily available documentation in our community. I’m sure we can find a solution around this, any ideas?
6 Likes
I’m very surprised you say that. Don’t some of your own free users (people who read and enjoy your great tutorials) become students in your courses? Maybe you are not seeing them as “free users” but they are.
2 Likes
Github pages can cover documentation sites. Demo sites are the real issue…
3 Likes
I have numbers, it isn’t a huge amount, tbh. We are talking less than 1% conversion on most of that stuff.
Okay, I get it, MDG doesn’t owe us anything and they have every right to shut it down but still, 2 weeks notice? Not cool.
8 Likes
Maybe 1% of new users convert to paid users but what percent of your current paying customers used or still use your free content? I’d wager it’s a higher percentage and an important part of your sales funnel.
Even if that is the case for yourself I don’t see the free tier as an integral part of the galaxy funnel.
1 Like
I think the difference here is that free content is ubiquitous and expected while free service tiers feel more like a gift to the customer imho. It’s hard to say how automatic migration would have improved the conversation rate from the free tier to Galaxy, it really depends on the number of free tier apps that are heavily utilized and not associated with a Galaxy connected account and the willingness of those customers to choose Galaxy (and hopefully not feeling burned) over mupx roll-your-own meteor deploy.
The analogy that is the interesting part here isn’t if the free tier is used or will convert, it is how much does it cost to maintain? For me, I put 5-10 hours into a high quality blog post and that will translate to customers. Free hosting likely draws hundreds of free apps that you end up wasting infrastructure and people costs on.
2 Likes
Perhaps, but demo sites are important. People need to be able to see, in a real meteor environment what some of the more aggressive packages do. It reduces the barrier to adoption and allows truly excellent packages to really bubble to the top helping keep Meteor on top. I think that taking away the demo space is a real mistake for the MDG. I know I for one will not be paying to host demos of my packages, I’ll continue to develop them for personal use and publish them, but I won’t bother working to get the word out because without a demo, what’s the point?
6 Likes
I had a suggestion in the One Galaxy for Everyone thread.
https://forums.meteor.com/t/one-galaxy-for-everyone/19247/13?u=cstrat&source_topic_id=19308Is it asking too much to ask that the bottom tier of Galaxy bills at a much lower rate than suggested during time when there are low to no users connected? I am not certain how MDG have setup the infrastructure, but I would think that those containers at volume would not cost a lot to maintain? Billing can be at the 0.035 rate if there are >x users connected (to prevent abuse and whatnot).
I am only a hobby dev who loves meteor and am more than happy to pay for Galaxy. I have a couple projects I am working on and I have DO for most of them, I have moved one to Galaxy. I would love to use Galaxy for them all - but this new pricing makes it too expensive. I am best off to just leave them on DO. $25USD per month for me is close to $35AUD per month. Meteor is getting to be an expensive hobby 
1 Like
Thanks for the free hosting until now guys! It certainly helped to get started with meteor. I would suggest extending the shutdown perhaps two weeks (I know, only the DB matters but still, it seems too fast). Also, some way for package authors to get a place for hosting would be a great idea. + Some free hosting hours upon signup I guess, otherwise people at hackathons are going to be very sad.
2 Likes
Given how much they have modeled their pricing off Heroku, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a Hobby tier at some point.
Yeah I really hope they do!
This sounds great. I am going to take a look.
I am 10 times more likely to spend $27 to run three hobby apps (with DB!!) than I am to pay MDG $25 for one without DB… as much as I want to contribute $$ to MDG, they are missing the mark here for small hobby devs.
3 Likes
Hi everyone,
I’m a teacher that uses Meteor to code applications for my school and classroom. To be clear, I currently have three apps deployed on the free deploy server at *.meteor.com, and yes, I will have to do the work of moving these sites to a new place. The public stance from Meteor has been that the free site should not really be used for production apps, something I’ve clearly been doing for over two years now. I re-read that line on the documentation website back in January and asked myself what I would do if I no longer had access to that site. The result: learned to host a site on my personal server. The process definitely had me scratching my head, but also meant that I had a better understanding of the value that the free site had given me over my time using it.
The reality is that Meteor has clearly and publicly shifted away from being just being that framework that has a free one line deployment. The framework has so much going for it, and the ability to create interesting apps is not going away. The shift toward doing what one does best requires hard choices, and the free site clearly was something that did not serve that purpose. It means that those of us that value the free deploy as a teaching tool can seek other options for making it as easy to get others in the game as it was for us.
Meteor has helped me be better at my job, and I appreciate the work of the MDG (and the large community of users) for helping me get to this point.
8 Likes