PaaS Pricing and Transparency – A Message from the CEO

At Engine Yard, we work hard to cultivate close relationships with you, our valued customers. Every part of our organization, from sales and support to product development and engineering, is keenly focused on our clients’ needs. We believe that is the only way we can continue to deliver increasing value so you can spend your time and attention on important innovation. So far this year, in direct response to your input, we’ve rolled out a variety of new features and capabilities that we hope make your jobs easier. (see our This Week at Engine Yard blog post series and our 2013 announcements). Most recently, we announced significant price reductions for Engine Yard Cloud that lower the cost to get started (just 5¢ an hour) and make it easier to scale up (with additional reductions on our largest instance sizes).

As we go forward, we’ll continue to invest our resources based on your feedback. We look to you to give us advice, help us set priorities and share your best-practice experiences. For example, from your feedback we’ve seen how important transparency is. Today our service is tightly coupled to the specific infrastructure instance size – and both PaaS and IaaS are combined in a single price. While this does give you full visibility into exactly what kind of infrastructure your app is running (unlike other PaaS offerings), we’re considering going one step further and breaking out the pricing of the infrastructure from the price of our platform. As part of this approach, we are looking at tiering our platform services to more closely match the varying requirements you have. Our platform services for small, simple environments would cost less than our services for large complex environments that utilize the most advanced features. We’d love your feedback on these approaches – and would greatly appreciate your comments and thoughts. Please post them below!