Revenue from customers.
Our initial start up funds was $25,000 of personal money put up by my partner. We’ve never taken any loan or third-party investor money.
We’ve launched several different lines of business and use money from the successful “cash cows” to incubate new ‘internal’ startups.
they already said individual developer pricing is coming!
but to be fair a business can’t use the free tier as-is for production as it spins down after clients are disconnected. To avoid this, we added a pinger to keep our free meteor host app alive. But I always worried if if a keep-alive was considered unacceptable-use of the free tier. Does MDG has have official opinion on that?
Here is the uptime report for an entire year of free hosting on meteor.com for a production app we ran with a keep-alive
Its is actually good practice for them to take on the bigger fish first, as they will more than likely require things or have questions for something that smaller developers would not otherwise ask for or need. You really do work out the most kinks when taking on bigger applications as opposed to a bunch of smaller ones. For right now meteor deploy will satisfy most small developers for free hosting. There is alway heroku or amazon in the meantime.
Can confirm, working in the IT dept. of a B2B company the current galaxy offering is perfect. 500 or even 1000 a month is considerably less then the devops guy I would need to hire for ~20 hours a week to do all that setup and maintenance.
While it is mildly disappointing that I can’t play with galaxy for my hobby projects it has been said in earlier blogs or press releases that “if you don’t have an ops department, galaxy is probably not for you”. Apparently this is already being downplayed with free and cheap plans coming soon.
In the mean time, it would make all of us in the community look a lot more friendly and human if we didn’t respond to galaxy seeing the light of day for the first time with angry oneliners about the price or regions, but instead see if anyone fits to profile to buy it and ask them about their experience.
What I would really like to see is an offering like the PHP/Mysql shared hosts out there… they are abundant, and they have been able to stay in business offering unlimited domains/ databases… extreme amounts of disk and bandwidth… for less than 10.00 a month. That means that once I commit to one of those services, I can develop unlimited php/mysql web apps and launch them all under the same account (but each with their own domain name), and if one takes off, then I can move it to a more robust hosting platform.
I don’t see that in the meteor community. I’ve emailed to Modulus about that and they said there is not a way to have more than one domain / application running within the same account.
That said, I am learning the tricks to get this type of thing working with nginx/ proxypass, so that could be done on Digital Ocean and the like, but it would be nice to have a managed hosting company with this pricing model.
It’s too bad that company policies for the company I currently freelance for require us to be hosted on Azure and for clients in Europe, it has to be in European datacenters. So Galaxy is not a real option ATM, but for any kind of semi-large company this kind of money is peanuts. For us, it would already be profitable only in devop hours we’d gain, let alone what we pay Azure right now.
If it would be cheaper, enterprises wouldn’t take it seriously. The company I currently work for is not that big (~3000 employees), and I already had a very hard time to convince them to use Meteor. Because at the time there was no commercial support available. It are these kind of clients that Meteor needs in order to survive. So even if you can not afford Galaxy, be very glad that it’s here and that it provides money to MDG to further develop Meteor.
I think 10 1GB containers with management and 1h response time support is OK for that price
Regarding EU/US, based on yesterday’s court ruling, you cant move data from EU to US due to security/NSA bullsh*t. So…
I’ve heard great stuff about Compose.io, but I’m not really a very credible source on this - maybe you should [have a look][1] yourself… 
[1]: https://www.compose.io/articles/meteors-new-galaxy-and-the-perfectly-composed-companion/
I am more concerned with the fact that we do not have any idea of WHEN they will offer hosting for down to people experimenting Meteor or low budget startups. Open Source is free and some people would appreciate the idea of putting their monthly fees in the hands of those developping the technology. Also, things should be “simple” and well documented (such as how to connect with MongoDB that is supposed to be part of the Meteor full stack) Of course, they owe us nothing, but, they work on what would help many people.
I fully agree the pricing is fair. This is a case of hearing what the client is really saying.
People are saying “this price is crazy what about the little guy?”
What they’re really saying is:
a) You need to be mindful of the little guys that helped you achieve all the stars/rapid growth
b) We’re not all business knowledgeable so when you communicate with us please remember that (think explaining the internet to your grandmother).
The issue everyone is having is around proper communication.
The communications team should have known that a lot of early adopters per your mission statement “This new way should be radically simple.” are exactly that demographic - people who aren’t exposed to enterprise level pricing.
So in the Our Galaxy plans section what do you think the conversion rate was of the vast majority of your user base in reading the very last line of this section (almost a footnote) “or purchase smaller plans for projects that aren’t a fit for a full commercial plan”? I doubt any greater than 5-10%. Rather, they were immediately deterred, put off and Googling MEAN or some variant.
A better idea would be to list the pricing plans first as you did, but with bold, italics, stars and some personality (to appeal to none business folks):
**Don’t worry! Individual/Startup pricing is coming soon - these are commercial/enterprise grade packages.
I hope this makes sense and is helpful for future communications.
I would argue the Team Plan isn’t even fit for Enterprise or Commercial use. It isn’t high availability. Today, the expectation is 100% uptime. So if AWS’ us-east cloud goes down (as it has in the past) and you’re on the Team Plan, you’re SOL. Not even $495/mo will get you HA. That surprised me a bit.
I swear I recall reading somewhere that there is a fall back of some sorts. So as you mentioned if/when us-east goes down they’re covered. Specifically, where I read this mentioned a recent outage and beta Galaxy users were still up and running. Maybe someone else has this reference.
Even with it staying awake it has spurts of really slow activity and occasional outages. Just today it was taking 15-20 seconds to login (both on east and west coast). Recently a client was showing a demo when it went down 
Keeping a $5 digital ocean box going it a way better value IMHO.
That being said for being free I can’t complain 
Today, the expectation is 100% uptime.
Not every startup or small business will lose $5000 per hour for downtime (the difference in cost between Team and Enterprise is $6000 annually). Take your average daily revenue and divide it by 24 hours to get the cost of downtime per hour. Now consider that 99.98% uptime is down for only 1 hour 45 minutes per year. So if the cost of 100% uptime is more than the cost of the downtime, then maybe it’s not worth it right?
99.99% uptime is down for less than 5m per month
Daily: 8.6s
Weekly: 1m 0.5s
Monthly: 4m 23.0s
Yearly: 52m 35.7s
99.98% is down for less than 2 hours per year.
Amazon us-east’s availability might be good enough for a lot of people.
I already use Compose
We have many apps running on Modulus on different domains under one account. Do you mean within the same servo??
it’s us-east ONLY presently
Yes, I mean within the same base cost structure, so if I pay 7.20 a month it seems I can only run a single app/website. if I pay 5-10 a month for a cheap php/mysql host, I can run many apps/websites. ( up to the limits of the processor, bandwidth, or disk usage of the account of course).
The above mentioned php/mysql hosting pricing structure encourages people to play with php application ideas, and launch them to the public on a real domain for 10 bucks a year registration fee, or on a subdomain they already own for no additional cost per year… I don’t see this in the meteor offerings out there right now (save for the free meteor hosting), so unless someone knows how to set up a DO server with nginx, multiple virtual hosts, and proxypas, they must first justify if their idea is worth another 7.20 a month to get another servo. That to me is unfortunate
I’m trying to put ideas in people’s heads: Start a meteor hosting company, offering 10.00 a month for unlimited separate domain/applications, up to a certain usage limit, so that 5 very low usage applications would cost the same as a single higher usage application.
With meteor being more efficient (ie. only data is going across the wire once the app is loaded) than say, php, you’d think hosting companies could exist with this model.
The latest Meteor Club Podcast was all about Galaxy. In it they mentioned Galaxy imposed no limits on mixing and matching deployed applications as you see fit. There was quite a bit of value-added described, that would certainly go a long way to justify that $500 a month price.
It’s certainly worth a listen.
