$495/month certainly aren’t startup prices, no matter how well funded a startup is. If a startup can’t deploy to a 5$ DO server or a AWS/Azure/Google Cloud where they probably get the first 2-3 years entirely free, then that startup probably wouldn’t be able to get funding in the first place and/or completely waste the money on infrastructure like that.
I get your point you’re making that it saves time and money, still I wouldn’t call $495 a decent price for startups yet. A Silicon valley startup will burn money way too fast like this unless they’re already round A funded and a Asian startup will basically be broke after ~4 months if they’d pay for that with a (even highly valuated) seed investment. So yea, while I understand the reasoning and why they’re pricing that high, let’s just hope that their lower prices won’t just be for startup unicorns .
I have to add my two cents, I was really hoping for something awesome with galaxy. I have recently taken up meteor up as my main framework and have been reading about and waiting for galaxy since hearing of it. Its extremely fd up that they would come out with pricing like this that does absolutely nothing for the average coder who is basically the lifeblood of meteor. What the f is going on and who thought this would be a good idea? Nothing for people learning to connect to the available services? How about someone check out google and their pricing scheme, theres is fairly reasonable and they charge a shit ton for support…makes sense. What Im saying meteor is thanks for nothing on this release, hopefully the next will be nice to the little guys.
You’re forgetting that it’s a luxury service. You can deploy your own applications on AWS,DO, Azure, GC or wherever and be fine. I mean Galaxy is literally hosted on AWS. If you get to the place where you need some more complicated (galaxy style) deployments then unless you are capable of doing that yourself (if you were you wouldn’t care about the galaxy price) you are going to have to fork over a lot of money on someone to deploy it for you. 495*12 = $5940/year on hosting. A devops engineer in SF/Bay Area will cost you over $100k a year.
Guys, stow away your pitchforks. It was clear for a long time that galaxy would be targeting large companies (at least initially), so there’s nothing strange about these prices. If you thought you would get cheap competitive prices in the league of self-hosted cloud platforms you were only fooling yourself.
Now to discuss the actual pricing:
I think the 500$ package might not be that attractive. Since it doesn’t offer HA, it’s simply a management/support service on top of aws ec2 containers with some additional metrics. Personally I’d either self-host on ec2 if below 500$ of server costs or potentially go straight to the business package if above.
Also, companies that would be able to spend that much on hosting are likely to have someone employed that is able to do the initial setup and maintenance does not take that much work, so personally I don’t see the point of the team package, the business package I would consider if the user-base was large enough.
As someone who doesn’t work on the Galaxy team, I think this is spot on. It’s a lot easier to iron out launch issues when you can focus on a few users. A lot of people in the company are very passionate about catering to smaller development shops and startups, and it is very certainly happening as soon as we can make it.
I also think it’s reasonable… high availability and the lack of wasting time with devops is important and valuable. I also think people are not factoring in the SLA response time of 1 hour for emergencies. That’s not cheap and digital ocean won’t pick up the phone if your X in meteor isn’t working right.
Modulus instances aren’t cheap either at $57 for a 1gb instance (I seem to remember they’re faster CPU wise than an EC2 micro).
If you have more money than time, use Galaxy, if you’re on a budget… roll your own infrastructure with DO. For small scale you can easily get by with auto scaling and load balancing with Modulus. Galaxy isn’t going to be cheaper than Modulus… they’re already giving you Meteor for free
Has anyone been able to deduce the size of the EC2 size? It seems like it’s basically a micro instance?
Blog Quote containers in Galaxy have a standard configuration: 1GB of RAM and 0.5 ECU – Amazon’s standard measure of processing capacity.
The press information out for months led us to believe Galaxy would be a Heroku-like Meteor host. Not just an enterprise hosting provider, but a one-stop-shop hosting service.
Is meteor deploy not heroku enough? If you have a free account on heroku your instance will go to sleep. If you have a free meteor deployment it goes to sleep? I feel like I’m missing your comparison.
Does Galaxy include a database?
Galaxy does not provide the database layer. You can run your own MongoDB server inside AWS, or create a database through any number of MongoDB hosting providers.
Free meteor hosting provides a database. You have to pay extra for the database on heroku. Also, heroku was started in 2007, raised $13 million, got acquired by salesforce for $250Million in 2010. Galaxy has been out for less than a day.
Lets think about focus. Do you want galaxy to support mongo, rethink, mysql, or postgresql first? A lot of people would say mongo first because that’s built in to meteor but then there would still be other people wanting other databases supported first. Let them focus on what they are good at for now. What they know more than anyone else about is hosting meteor applications. Let compose, mongohq/joyent, MMS, and ALL the other database providers focus on what they do well which is hosting databases.
After the bugs are worked out (theres going to be some) they can go and be a hosting service for all meteor related services.
my day job is at an enterprise company (8,000+ employees). we’ve been self-hosted in internal data centers for a long time and we’re slowly moving to AWS. it takes a lot of time, money and effort to run your own data center and ensure high availability, there are lots of advantages to paying another company to do it. and when you’re enterprise scale, it doesn’t really hurt to spend $200k+ on hosting if it scales to your needs. a single dev ops engineer costs around $100k a year with benefits and everything, getting an army of them supporting your servers for the same price as a few engineers’ salary is a pretty sweet deal
hahaha hi peter! I’m just waiting for the excuse to use Meteor here at work. but I was commenting on the justification of pricing in general for enterprise, $500/mo is pocket change for the big players
+1 Even though modulus and NodeJitsu offerer databases I always go with a dedicated host like compose.io and then just paste in a MONGO_URL variable. They focus 100% on making your database awesome. Switching between Modulus, DO, AWS, etc… is a snap because your database still lives in one spot.
Hi there, I’m Geoff, one of the founders of Meteor and the CEO.
Many businesses will pay $495/month for the “business class” version of a service like Galaxy. Compare with Heroku. If you want to buy support from Heroku it costs a minimum of $1000/month, just to get the 24x7 support with a 1 hour SLA. (That’s in addition to your container costs! Heroku would then charge you another $500 or $1000/month for 10GB of dynos.) For a business that wants 24x7 support, $495/month is a great deal.
We’ve tested the price carefully – we’ve been selling Galaxy for a month through our Early Access Program. Sales have been great. There is an argument that we should be charging more for it (just compare $2000 paid to Heroku, versus $495 for Galaxy for a more advanced and capable platform) but we wanted to make it a no-brainer.
We want to make Galaxy available to everyone, so we’ll be introducing two new plans: a free plan, and a paid plan at a low price that every Meteor developer can afford. We started here because we wanted to work closely with a smaller number of sites and make sure we deliver a great product, and then expand from there. The Meteor community is broad, with many developers around the world with many different requirements, so please bear with us as we build out a set of options that accommodates everyone.
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hahaha hi peter! I’m just waiting for the excuse to use Meteor here at work. but I was commenting on the justification of pricing in general for enterprise, $500/mo is pocket change for the big players