Benito Serna Tips and tools for Ruby on Rails developers

Guide to justify the heroku's price to your boss or clients

June 14, 2021

Maybe your are thinking that you should just use Heroku and move on with your life. Do something that provides value to the customer instead of host configurations.

But is not always that easy, because if you just compare the cost of GB of Ram or CPUs, it does not look that well… $50 for 1gb is barely enough and maybe it won’t let you sleep at night… But then $250 for 2.5gb or $500 for 14gb could be more than enough.

So you would need to ask your boss or clients something between $50-500/month, and maybe it could look like too much.

Maybe Heroku is actually really expensive for your project, but maybe not, here I want to share with you some things that you could do to justify the price to your boss or client if you think that heroku (or another PaSS) is the right choice for your project.

Identify the things that you need from heroku

Remember the things that heroku is doing for you, that your project needs, and use them as a tool to justify the price to your boss or client.

Here a list some of the features of heroku but there are more…

Remember what they are actually paying for developers

If you think that they are already paying between $20 and $200 per hour, maybe increasing your price a little to cover other $50-$500 per month, could be possible if you list all the things that they could have for that money (take them from the list above).

Remember that devops is a thing

If your service includes keeping the application up, charging for that is ok.

Think how much this could cost if you outsource it…

You could use that number to justify the increase of your price.

Remember that devops can go wrong

If you are not a devops pro, or even if you hire a team of senior devops, things can go wrong and its possible that even after spending a lot of money on the migration from heroku, the project must be moved to heroku again.

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