Right? Right?!

This is just blatantly untrue.

I was an application developer at a place using Heroku for over four years, and I guarantee you we exceeded the aforementioned 2-devs-3-days-per-month in man hours in my time there due to Heroku:

- Matching up local env to Heroku images, and figuring out what it actually meant when we had to move off deprecated versions

- Peering at Heroku charts because lack of real machine observability, and eventually using Node to capture OS metrics and push them into our existing ELK stack because there was just no alternative

- Fighting PR apps to get the right set of env vars to test particular features, and maintaining a set of query-string overrides because there was no way to automate it into the PR deploy

I'm probably forgetting more things, but the idea that Heroku is zero effort for developers is laughable to me. I hate docker personally but it's still way less work than Heroku was to maintain, even if you go all the way down the rabbit hole of optimizing away build times et.

Is that what developers at your company cost?

Just curious. In Sweden the average devops salary is around 60k.

> you are dedicating 2 resources 3 times a month and this is already costing you ~38k/year on salaries

Ok. So we're currently saving more than 400k/year on our migration. That would be worth 38k/year in salaries to us. But note that our actual salary costs are significantly lower.

> that's assuming your engineers have somehow mastered_both_ devops and software (very unlikely)

Both me and my colleague are proficient at operations as well as programming. I personally believe the skillsets are complimentary and that web developers need to get into operations / scaling to fully understand their craft. But I've deployed web sites since the 90s. Maybe I'm a of a different breed.

We achieved 4 nines of up time in our first year on this platform which is more than we ever achieved using Heroku + other managed cloud services. We won't reach 4 nines in our second year due to a network failure on Hetzner, but so far we have not had downtime due to software issues.

> This also assumes your infra doesn't grow and requires more maintenance

In general the more our infra grows the more we save (and we're still in the process of cutting additional costs as we slowly migrate more stuff over). Since our stack is automated we don't see any significant overhead in maintenance time for adding additional servers.

Potentially some crazy new software could come along that would turn out to be hard to deploy. But if it would be cheaper to use a managed option for that crazy software we could still just use a managed service. It's not like we're making it impossible to use external services by self-hosting.

Note that I wouldn't recommend Reclaim the Stack to early stage startups with minor hosting requirements. As mentioned on our site I think it becomes interesting around $5,000/month in spending (but this will of course vary on a number of factors).

> Focusing on building features and generating revenue is much valuable than wasting precious engineering time maintain stacks.

That's a fair take. But the trade-offs will look different for every company.

What was amazing for us was that the developer experience of our platform ended up being significantly better than Heroku's. So we are now shipping faster. Reducing costs by an order of magnitude also allowed us to take on data intensive additions to our product which we would have never considered in the previous deployment paradigm since costs would have been prohibitively high.

Well there's salary, and total employee cost. Now sure how it works in Sweden, but here in Belgium it's a good rule of thumb that an employer pays +- 2,5 times what an employee nets at the end after taxes etc. So say you get a net wage of €3300/month or about €40k/year ends up costing the employer about €100k.

I'm a freelance devops/sre/platform engineer, and all I can tell you is that even for long-term projects, my yearly invoice is considerably higher than that.