This looks sleek, but I’ll ask the obvious question: Why use this over Heroku? I couldn’t find a good answer to that question from a quick look at the website, aside from maybe the fact that it uses AWS and Digital Ocean.
It is easy to start on Heroku. With one app, one process.
When you have multiple apps and several processes there is a way to reduce costs and not loose in convenience.
$10/mo droplet can hold plenty of apps and it is still $10/mo. If you don't need a production grade Database – Appliku has them at 0 cost.
Back in a day I moved several of my side projects to Heroku. I was happy until i received a $90+ invoice by the end of the month. Now a $10/mo droplet holds even more projects for me.
Thanks for the response. My two cents: price is not the thing that I would compete on. For any "real" business, the cost of Heroku is negligible compared to its benefits; a few hundred dollars per month in savings is just not enough to convince most companies to migrate to a completely new service that isn't as battle tested and has fewer features. At the same time, I'm not convinced you could make any significant amount of money tailoring your service to side projects.
With that said, I think you have a great product and could probably make some decent money by offering some combination of niche features. Ideas off the top of my head:
* Integrated metrics. Since you're primarily targeting Django apps, it should be feasible to collect health/performance stats from the apps and display them in a simple dashboard. You don't need to offer very much here; most companies would be more than happy with basic stats related to response times per route, although SQL query times would be really neat to see.
* Automatic scaling for your Python projects. If you could apply the same ease of deployment to horizontal scaling, that would be really valuable.
* Easy integration with AWS services like S3, SES, and SNS. You could do this in a number of ways. One idea is to provide a set of Django libraries that, for instance, makes sending SMS messages super simple, with no configuration needed when used via Appliku. Or you could integrate with existing libraries and just remove the configuration step for the developer.
With at least one of the above (or some other differentiator), I could see Appliku taking off. In any case, you have a great product, and I wish you the best of luck!
So first I am thinking what is the best way to offer scaling. There are so many ways how it can be done and in other comment threads there are hot debates happening about that. It is still an open question.
I was thinking about tailoring more features for django too. Not only price is different, but I picked Django for a reason. It is a great suggestion about metrics per route. I haven’t thought about it before.
Integration with AWS services – Yes. That’s why initially i had a wide range of recommended Policies to include in AWS credentials. My goal was to make automation around creating not only app but all auxiliary services without the need for user to deal with AWS manually.
basically let appliku orchestrate 3rd party services in order to get the “recommended setup”.
So not only I have limited positioning to Python/Django niche, but next tools that will appear will make people using this popular framework way happier by taking away their pain.
You can do Dokku, you can setup dokku and deploy apps with dokku. no problem.
But I wanted a solution where I don't need to remember anything DevOps while writing/shipping my apps.
I also added a generous free plan that allows all features. Then AWS has free credits so one can start their next big thing without expenses and not learning a single thing about deployment at all
Heroku is a general apps platform. This seems to be tailored specifically to Django/Python (with the option of using your own Dockerfile so could deploy anything). One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku. If you're a Python-only shop, it might make more sense.
> One could easily imagine that the performance and stability should be a lot higher than with Heroku.
No, I can’t imagine that. Why would performance be any different? I imagine most of these kinds of solutions use Docker behind the hood anyway, so they’re likely to be identical.
That makes more sense, but the deploy cycle is already really fast with Heroku. I'm not sure if there is very much value in trying to shave off a few more seconds.
Depending on your requirements build ties in Heroku can be quite long. One app i’ve recently observed take 7 minutes to build because it always had to build both JS and Django parts(buildpacks for both were executed every time). We made it way faster with custom docker file that used caches and often built under 40 seconds. i am not saying that is not doable in Heroku, but would take more effort.
only if developer/devops/admin time is free and for most it isnt. if 60 vs 250 /month is a breaking factor for you and your use case: go for it. if you need the software deployed to make real business it just doesnt matter.
> if you need the software deployed to make real business it just doesnt matter
No wonder AWS can get away with the prices they have since people like you (and many more VC funded startups) simply have zero care about the price.
For people who run "real" businesses (meaning you need to have a larger income than expense [meaning, everything not VC-funded]), price is always a part of the calculations, even when it comes to hosting.
having something that specific, tailored for dynamic language, seems like overkill
i'd undestand if it was for something highly performant and hard to deploy
Maybe, but maybe not. If you're using Python/JavaScript and have a ton of dependencies, most of your deploy-time is gonna be spent downloading dependencies. If the host you're using is specifically setup for Python/JavaScript, they can run a registry mirror with 100% of the packages right next to the host, and remove basically most time spent downloading the packages.
Same goes for other time-consuming activities like code coverage or even running the tests. If the applications running on the platform are somewhat heterogeneous, then you can start doing really aggressive performance work.
