New post on /r/flutterdev subreddit:
<b>I'm building a social media platform. The Flutter Frontend is nearly ready. The backend started on Firebase, but my conviction is starting to wane. Pricing for Terabyte scale traffic seems more attractive at Digital Ocean. Advice? I need to commit to a vendor soon</b>
First, a few words about the application scale. I'm building an app to replace discord for online projects. It's a better discord with features to publish posts like on reddit and integrated calendar, goals and events. It's meant to help teams of volunteers improve their collaboration and get support from the greater audience. For example, it helps project leads to onboard new volunteers. The coordinators team can easily orient them by sending them to the About or Repository pages. Etc, etc, etc. If you want more info I'm posting updates in <a href="/r/VisualSpace">r/VisualSpace</a>. There's also a <a href="
https://visualspace.app">live demo</a> (read only) and a <a href="
https://discord.gg/5V2BWUyEvP%5D">discord server</a>.<strong>Firebase? Digital Ocean? AWS?</strong>I'm starting to have "buyers remorse" regarding Firebase. I mean it's all cool and fancy with all this real time stuff, but... I look at the transfer fees, and the Firebase offer starts to sour a bit. I know for a fact that VS will go into the Terabytes traffic range quite fast (even before the first 12 months) based on expected customers. No question about the high volume expectations. And regardless, there will be lots of teams and files to store. + if you include video editors, things will get nasty fast. So... I was looking at the firebase pricing, and it ain't looking good.<strong>1) Transfer Rates per Tera</strong> - I was looking around for Digital Ocean, they seem to brag about tiny transfer rates pricing. Which is a big + for VS. VS will have A LOT of traffic, not just dumb storage/archiving. So I think price sensitivity for data transfer is a top concern.<strong>2) Vendor Lock In</strong> - Second thing to consider is vendor lock in. The more I play around the more I realise that Firebase has you by the balls. If you want to do a migration you are toasted. As cool as having a BAAS for prototyping is, I think the real concern is to be able to expand with various infrastructure extensions. I believe that once the effort to build the developer API the true downside of Firebase will show up. It wont be pretty to extend the BAAS with specialised tooling for a developers API.<strong>3) 3rd party developers API</strong> - Knowing that there will be a need to build a custom developers API I think building a custom VPS cluster with docker and Kubernetes is more future proof. Also This is something that is still unclear for me. Assuming that you rev a droplet to max throttle in DO it seems that you can get cheaper compute time than AWS by a large margin. Let me know if this is a misunderstanding on my side. I do expect that the VS app will have constant compute demands, so I expect AWS to be eye watering expensive.<strong>4) Custom vs Managed Load Balancing</strong> As I read from the web, Digital Ocean load balancing is all manually crafted, vs AWS which has everything built in. However AWS will hammer your wallet really hard. So I'd rather go the native way and setup my own VPS cluster with dedicated load balancer instance, etc. I know however that this means 1 month extra dev time to invest on things that Firebase or AWS give out of the box. Which again, is cool to save time, but given the massive scope of the future VS infrastructure and<strong>5) Future Proof and Independent</strong> You might say: go fast and scale later. Well that means I'll have to kiss the ring and get some investors onboard, that's something I def don't want to do. I'd rather do the extra mile and have full custom build rather than pushing tech debt under the rug until my private budget can't afford it anymore. As for budget, I can afford even 1K per month in cloud costs, so don't think small when pondering on it.My bias is to:Build…