Yep, that’s the obvious reason not to go for them but it wouldn’t be enough in isolation. I mean, things like RDS and SQS and DynamoDB are crazy good and many of us would never succeed in bringing up just one Linux server with the guarantees of these services. So it’s 50/50 and big orgs don’t care much about the vendor lock-in because they will do it with one service or another anyway.
And THAT is why I hate them with a passion. I also heard stories that they went to buy a cloud service company, did “due diligence” to understand what exactly are they doing and how are they making their profit, then bailed out of the deal and cloned the service, driving that smaller company out of the market.
For that alone they’ll never get any significant business from me. But I admit that I am contemplating using some of their services in the future. Some of their stuff is really good and it speaks volumes about everyone else that they almost have no good competition.
Well this is an old tactic that continues to be used a lot in startups acquisitions, but will continue working in the future, even long established companies fall into this trap when someone bigger try to acquire them.
The Non Disclosure agreements signed in this acquisitions negotiation processes are a legal document that is hard to enforce afterwards in practice, or may cost you resources you cannot afford when fighting a giant that can throw all the money they want in lawyers and to buy influence under the table.
I’ve been using Gigalixir for a long while now for a few sites I run. It’s solid, no complaints. You can run a reasonable phoenix app for $10/$15 a month, depending on your memory usage. Where did the $30 number come from?
Edit: Ah, perhaps it’s the database requirement… that will make it more expensive for sure.
I have used GCP, Gigalixir and DO. In the end I went for the cheapest - DO. I did a basic blog about setting it up without a PG database (https://andrewbarr.io/posts/website-and-blog-5-dolllars-a-month-p1 but it isn’t much more complicated to add a DB option for an additional $20pm.
I deploy using Github Actions but its does go down for a restart cycle.
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