I’m concerned if the life and blood of this framework is the MDG team, and this is the monetization model to support it.
Who could justify paying that much for hosting? Obviously they aren’t interested in smaller players taking advantage of Galaxy hosting.
But even so, adoption by bigger players has been very minimal at best.
Is anyone else concerned?
Concerned is the right word here…
Well the blog post does mention that they will be introducing free and lower cost tiers in the future. The current pricing is aimed at enterprise.
Not concerned. The commercial level pricing models were the ones released today. The blog post indicates that they will move the free “meteor deploy” to Galaxy and in the future they will have different pricing options for projects that don’t require as much firepower.
I see this as an extended beta test. Take some big fish, work closely with them, iron out the kinks. Then roll out to others in due time.
I was about to write something similar. Why cater to the <1% first? Surely the vast majority of folks have smaller setups and can’t afford this pricing. It would make sense to try smaller fish first and then move up ?
If you guys are right that these are only for big fish, then the launch page needs to do a better job of explaining that. Right now it seems like: Free tier…then straight to 500…what is in between?
Ok – so I looked at the blog post. They will introduce smaller plans. That will certainly help with the building community aspect of it. But for now, it is limited to a few that could justify that price.
That price was seriously shocking. I hope they have better plans for the small fish otherwise no thanks I will stick with MUP and Digital Ocean.
I think it’s a decent Agile move… No one wants to scale a system like that too quickly, so they are filtering out the rush that would have happened if they released to a general audience to see how the system handles and permitting the time to fix any kinks that come up. Otherwise I, and every other person on this forum, would have signed up for the $5 plan I was assuming would exist right now, and complications might have come up
I really like that price… 
This is a bummer for me. My meteor apps are large enough to not want to host on free meteor deploy, but small enough to not warrant a $500/month plan.
Where’s the $40/month plan? The $100/month?
Also the fact that it doesn’t come with the database is off putting. I was under the impression all these months that Galaxy would be a one-stop-shop for Meteor hosting.
Bummer, total bummer. I hope they come out with more middle ground pricing.
Complexities of devops are exacerbated at scale, so it’s fitting to work towards a solution from this angle–solve the hard problems at scale, then scale the solution down. Plus, the signal to noise ratio of early users will likely be much higher. Zero concern here.
And what about Europe? I only saw AWS us east zones mentioned. Did I miss something?
Eagerly awaiting the cheaper startup friendly prices. Our startup is probably closing our first funding deal in 1-2 months but still, some startup friendly pricings would be greatly appreciated. I hope this won’t take longer than a month to roll out, or at least the free tier will be usable for small production apps without resets.
Also dear MDG, please don’t forget Asia 
! Need some servers there ;)!
Yeah, seems expensive to me as well. As for targeting Enterprise…it sort of feels like ‘enterprise’ companies could invest time in ramping up devops themselves.
This is exactly right.
$495/mo is a well researched price, and extremely reasonable for established companies who are using Meteor to expand into new markets or improve internal efficiencies.
$495/month isn’t meant for individual developers. It’s meant for funded startups that don’t want to deal with dev/application ops. $495/month is way cheaper than hiring someone who’s job is to set up deployments. We shouldn’t forget that MDG itself is a startup with investors ($31Million worth) and they need to make money. $495/month really isn’t that much if you also consider that it is a luxury service. It’s not like MDG is forcing you to use or pay for the service. You can still set up your own production deployments that do everything that Galaxy is offering. Things that are hard to do (set up reliable production deployments) are going to cost money. Meteor has already given you the ability to build the apps you want to build in record time.
You can build and deploy a production meteor application in under a month if you try. You can get users that same month if you really try. Depending on location you can get investment pretty soon after that if you have built something useful that people like and understand. After getting some investment you can then move your deployment over to Galaxy and not worry about how expensive it is because it will still be cheaper than getting an employee dedicated to devops.
The market of people willing to pay $495/mo for Meteor doesn’t make it viable currently. As a developer, that concerns me because of MDG goes down, what happens to the community?
I think there is serious potential for some professional meteor devops service business model here to fill the gap left open now that we know galaxy will never compete with digital ocean deployments.