What's the cheapest way to host an app?
Discussion
I'm part of a three person team that has built an app in our spare time. It's been approved by the Apple App Store for beta testing but we haven't started recruiting testers yet, so just the three of us are currently using it. We are hosting it on Azure which has been costing about £30/month, however, the team member who holds the purse strings checked our outgoings today and discovered that the last two months' payments were over £60 and £70 respectively. We can't afford this at the moment so we need to know if there's a cheaper way of hosting it. Are there any hosting services for apps out there that charge a minimal amount on the basis that only a few people are using your app? We need to be back in the £30/month ballpark.
What are you hosting? Azure functions and a relational database or blob storage? Your hosting cost sounds reasonable to me. If you want to go live and build up a user base you're going to need to dig deep to provide a resilient back-end, so may as well factor the hosting costs in now
Basically it's an iOS app built in Xamarin. I can't elaborate much more than that because I'm not the developer. I've looked at the pricing pages for Firebase, AWS, etc. and they might as well be written in Russian as far as I can understand what they say. The dev guy should be all over this but, while he is great at dev, he is also resolutely unwilling to get involved in anything outside the "doing the dev" box.
I'm skint because I have a s
t job. My OH, who's idea it was and is the business brain, is skint because she's working part time so she can spend two days a week chasing funding opportunities. The dev guy is earning more than the two of us combined but, because he knows we can't manage without him, won't share any of the costs.
I get that we need to factor in hosting costs once it's launched and we know what that's likely to be. We've already established that we won't be able to launch without funding, but we've been told we stand a good chance of getting this if we can prove the concept and the demand for it with a good MVP. We have the MVP but we can't operate it unless we can afford to, which we can't on our threadbare incomes.
Essentially we need to be able to support the three of us and, maybe, ten or so beta testers initially for a maximum of about £40/month.
I'm skint because I have a s
t job. My OH, who's idea it was and is the business brain, is skint because she's working part time so she can spend two days a week chasing funding opportunities. The dev guy is earning more than the two of us combined but, because he knows we can't manage without him, won't share any of the costs.I get that we need to factor in hosting costs once it's launched and we know what that's likely to be. We've already established that we won't be able to launch without funding, but we've been told we stand a good chance of getting this if we can prove the concept and the demand for it with a good MVP. We have the MVP but we can't operate it unless we can afford to, which we can't on our threadbare incomes.
Essentially we need to be able to support the three of us and, maybe, ten or so beta testers initially for a maximum of about £40/month.
Currently your question is "how much does a car cost?"
Are we talking a 10 year old banger or a Ferrari ? who knows.
If you can log in to the portal go to the cost management bit and get a list of costs by resource, blank out all the names just so we can see what types of resources you have and their relative cost.
Are we talking a 10 year old banger or a Ferrari ? who knows.
If you can log in to the portal go to the cost management bit and get a list of costs by resource, blank out all the names just so we can see what types of resources you have and their relative cost.
mikef said:
On both counts, ditch him and start again. He's a low-tech mercenary and you can't afford one
Xamarin is fine for now. It can be re-built natively at a later stage but not until enough man hours are available, which will be when we have the financial resources to not have do day jobs to pay the bills.No point ditching the developer. He's working for an equity stake as we can't afford to pay anyone and finding someone to work on this basis was excruciatingly hard, so it's unlikely we'd be able to do it again. We can't get funding at such an early stage to pay someone or an agency to do it. We did speak to an agency in the early days, but not only did they expect to be paid a huge amount of money to do it, they would then own the IP and charge us £400/month to license it from them!
loudlashadjuster said:
Yeah, I would say this does not sound like the start of a beautiful relationship.
Is ownership of the IP defined and accepted? (he asked nervously)
The relationship is well established and is good enough. He's delivered a working MVP so no complaints there. The consensus online seems to be the developers are difficult to work with because people who are inherently good at dev are not the best at anything outside that box. I think we just have to suck that up.Is ownership of the IP defined and accepted? (he asked nervously)
We have a limited company. The company owns the IP. We have a founders agreement drawn up by a lawyer who specialises in the tech space to ensure that this is the case.
It's simply a case of keeping our costs at a minimum while we get to the point of being able to get some financial backing.
As others have said without knowing what you are using Azure for its hard to say how you can cut costs. For beta testing though you shouldn't need much at all. I assume you have some backend APIs and possibly some storage.
On one hand I'm not surprised the dev doesn't want to touch it. In a proper dev team that sort of thing would be handled by DevOps or Cloud Engineers. But given this is a small start up he should be rolling his sleeves up and helping out.
ETA I just received read the post again. So your dev isn't being paid for this but has equity. Equity doesn't mean anything until you make some money and he is unwilling to chip in 30 notes a month to try and make that a reality. Developers are well paid so I would be surprised if he can't afford it. He sounds like a tt. I appreciate you are stuck with him for now, I am surprised you found someone to work for free in the first place.
On one hand I'm not surprised the dev doesn't want to touch it. In a proper dev team that sort of thing would be handled by DevOps or Cloud Engineers. But given this is a small start up he should be rolling his sleeves up and helping out.
ETA I just received read the post again. So your dev isn't being paid for this but has equity. Equity doesn't mean anything until you make some money and he is unwilling to chip in 30 notes a month to try and make that a reality. Developers are well paid so I would be surprised if he can't afford it. He sounds like a t
t. I appreciate you are stuck with him for now, I am surprised you found someone to work for free in the first place. Edited by Scabutz on Friday 30th April 15:30
buggalugs said:
As said above it 100% depends what your requirements are. You could most likely do it cheaper on digital ocean or linode but it’s hard without knowing what you actually need.
That's the thing. I don't really know what we need as it's way beyond me to understand that side of things. I just wondered if there was some kind of hosting service that's sympathetic to start-ups that aren't making any money and offers some kind of affordable fixed cost package.Scabutz said:
I am surprised you found someone to work for free in the first place.
He wanted a side project for equity rather than more paying work but, yes, it was very hard to find someone on this basis. We did have someone previously but he wanted to build it natively in React and ultimately conceded that it would take a team of five a good six months working full time to do what he thought was needed, and decided to bail out, hence our current guy using a framework. He's delivered a product that works end-to-end in terms of the core feature, and it's ready to test, so no complaints really, just apprehension about a huge hosting bill arising from testing with five to ten people if three of us can rack-up £70+ per month.I am starting wonder how anyone gets anything off the ground without already having so much money that they might as well just retire!
)There are other things in this situation to consider. I say this as someone who has sold an internet startup venture to a. VC - but had to dip deep into my pockets to get to that point. You say you're looking for funding, but in my experience any commercial investor is highly likely to want you to have significant skin in the game beyond an idea and bit of coding time. It's not unusual for them to expect you to refinance your house to share the ramp-up costs
MitchT said:
He wanted a side project for equity rather than more paying work but, yes, it was very hard to find someone on this basis. We did have someone previously but he wanted to build it natively in React and ultimately conceded that it would take a team of five a good six months working full time to do what he thought was needed, and decided to bail out, hence our current guy using a framework. He's delivered a product that works end-to-end in terms of the core feature, and it's ready to test, so no complaints really, just apprehension about a huge hosting bill arising from testing with five to ten people if three of us can rack-up £70+ per month.
I am starting wonder how anyone gets anything off the ground without already having so much money that they might as well just retire!
Just to pick up on this bit.I am starting wonder how anyone gets anything off the ground without already having so much money that they might as well just retire!
£70 a month is peanuts. You've already said that you aren't paying your dev. You do seem to be expecting to launch this product without actually putting anything in.
Surely you have a business plan? You don't need to give numbers, but you must have mapped out your expected costs and revenue over the next 1/3/5 years? Have you worked out realistic figures for hosting, marketing, maintenance, customer support etc. etc.?
Or has it gone "Idea -> <magic> -> Profit!!" ?
We can't refinance our house because we don't have one - we're renting - so that's not an option. In terms of "skin in the game" - we've invested what we can in various professional services that we've needed along the way, the OH went part time as her job was sufficiently well paid that she could afford to, so she's sacrificed significant earnings, and I've ploughed a ton of time into it that I could conceivably have spent freelancing to earn extra money compared with the pittance I'm paid. I could have done a better paid job but would have had a big commute on my hands, time which is better spent on the project. If that's not good enough then clearly the whole thing is rigged so that people who don't have much to begin with won't be able to better themselves.
That said, we've spoken to various VCs and organisations that work in the start-up space and they've all indicated that we should be good for backing once we have some initial user feedback. The only person we've spoken to who used the phrase "skin in the game" was a VC who was working with tens of millions of pounds of family money and clearly couldn't comprehend that some of us aren't born with very rich parents.
That said, we've spoken to various VCs and organisations that work in the start-up space and they've all indicated that we should be good for backing once we have some initial user feedback. The only person we've spoken to who used the phrase "skin in the game" was a VC who was working with tens of millions of pounds of family money and clearly couldn't comprehend that some of us aren't born with very rich parents.
deckster said:
Just to pick up on this bit.
£70 a month is peanuts. You've already said that you aren't paying your dev. You do seem to be expecting to launch this product without actually putting anything in.
Surely you have a business plan? You don't need to give numbers, but you must have mapped out your expected costs and revenue over the next 1/3/5 years? Have you worked out realistic figures for hosting, marketing, maintenance, customer support etc. etc.?
Or has it gone "Idea -> <magic> -> Profit!!" ?
We've put an awful lot in. Everything we have, money wise, and a ton of time. We have a very detailed business plan but to realise the numbers there's an initial canyon that needs to be crossed. As with most things, the point at which you need help is the point at which people are most reluctant to provide it.£70 a month is peanuts. You've already said that you aren't paying your dev. You do seem to be expecting to launch this product without actually putting anything in.
Surely you have a business plan? You don't need to give numbers, but you must have mapped out your expected costs and revenue over the next 1/3/5 years? Have you worked out realistic figures for hosting, marketing, maintenance, customer support etc. etc.?
Or has it gone "Idea -> <magic> -> Profit!!" ?
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