I’m starting to get a liking for Apollo and I’m a fan of performance monitoring. Optics looks like a great solution, though I haven’t tried it out yet, mainly because I don’t want to lose my free 15 days yet. This is because I think the entry price is pretty high. For an early product, 49$ per month “just” for monitoring is a lot.
Granted, you could argue that “premature optimization is the root of all evil” applies here and that you shouldn’t care about performance monitoring at this stage. Personally I would prefer to do it from the beginning though. What do you think of the pricing? I’d prefer a tiered pricing, like
free (current limitations)
basic (15$ or so, no limitations, up to a certain amount of requests)
While I don’t use Apollo yet (waiting for the pub/sub level of experience, if it’s ever going to come), the prices seem reasonable. At the point I really need these performance data, 49$ is not that much. Having some free and basic plans is fine.
I was going to say the same as @sashko: What are your options?
I’m confused: “No limitations, up to a certain amount”
Isn’t a limited number of request a limitation?
That’s pretty much what you get for free: 100,000 request per month. That seems like enough to evaluation Optics and determine if it’s valuable to you organization. What are you really asking for?
Either it’s worth it or it’s not, but I don’t think they should give away all their hard work to suit everyone’s budget. The whole point in being innovative is to command premium profits (superior ROI). That’s why MDG is building Optics instead of working on being yet another low-cost provider in some crowded race-to-the-bottom industry. $49 monthly is less than what my team spends more on coffee beans each month.
The only alternative you may get fairly easy is deploying your own Kadira.
If you’re fine with trading developer-hours instead of mounthly payment you’re free to go that way.
Though, I’d consider spending 15$ for everything ready-on. If your “early product” will hit the limit over within in a mounth, then, perhaps, you’re the one who should share your expierence
I don’t think that’s the original poster’s goal. I want to support MDG, and I think that he does too. I put a lot of resources behind RethinkDB and Horizon. Whoops. We need to financially support great developer tools.
But for one man bands, $49 is steep. You make a good point about the free tier. Maybe MDG is being too liberal? I concur with the original poster that a ~$15/mo price is something the small guys can swallow and happily contribute. Just food for thought.
A day of work for some == impossible to understand let alone build for others.
I agree that their should be some more pricing tiers or maybe per-sage pricing. Also I hope there are more open source options for this as Apollo becomes popular.
But Apollo is only for GraphQL, right? I think we can’t compare it with Kadira because it monitors queries AND client/server errors. Just paying high prices to monitor one part of the app isn’t really a good deal. I would prefer an all in one tool, especially if MDG provides it.
The pricing just doesn’t make sense to me. Why do I care about 100k requests in a free plan? If i’m in the range where I cannot pay, I probably have either a) a few 100 users of a hard to monetize product or b) or 2 o 3 users of a product that can be monetized from day one. Performance tracing and longer persistence is far more interesting for me. Why would I want to build an app which serves 100k requests per month but not care about optimizing the performance for so many requests?
And like someone said, yes I think tiered pricing makes more sense, especially for early projects. There’s a reason why most products gradually push you into higher pricing. From 0 to 49$ is a pretty big leap, especially considering that I think 100k requests takes a while to reach. I’m sure more people would just pay for their own pet projects if there’d be a plan for roughly 15$. I work for a venture builder, sure we don’t give a shit about the 50$. I give a shit for my personal projects though
even if it were $15 there would be just as many people complaining. people say they “cannot pay $XX” but in fact they just want to spend that money on other things.
Maybe Optics should have a free plan like Kadira with 24 hours of data retention. Their free plan was so useful I didn’t need to pay them a dime to use it for my commercial business! Never mind Kadira is shutting down because their business model wasn’t sustainable at a level worth their time. What could go wrong?
I concur with the original poster that a ~$15/mo price is something the small guys can swallow and happily contribute. Just food for thought.