cornflake

CI pricing (gitlab, github actions, circleci etc.) is all extortionate. When they price by 'user seat' (gitlab) or 'credit' (circleci), comparing pricing is like trying to pick a cell phone plan.

AWS Code Build will always be an order of magnitude cheaper, it's just slightly harder to set up but it works very well. It's unclear how all these other services will ever compete with that.

For example, to run a CI server on Gitlab for a team of 8 that never spun down, it would cost $492 per month on their 'shared' runners. On AWS Code Build, you get a DEDICATED ec2 instance for $223 per month and only pay for what you use when it's running.

Segment is a good concept but when they bumped their pricing up to ludicrous mode, it justified a small rewrite to reproduce their functionality in our back-end to drop them and we haven't looked back. No way i'll be going back to their service factoring that experience.

Interested to see what the back-end of this 'free period' will cost for the startups who get in bed with them - $120 per month for up to 10k MAU and then 'custom' pricing beyond that according to their pricing page.

It's worth a lot less than that to us.

That keynote helps a lot, thanks Stewart

The free version of Google Analytics gets capped at a certain volume of traffic whereas Firebase doesn't. That's definitely one motivating factor to make the switch.

I'll be interested to check it out when they get around to introducing Real-Time user stats to firebase. That's a pretty crucial component of analytics which I have open all the time.

Google contacted me to switch to firebase from analytics. Seems like they're putting a lot of effort into re-launching the firebase brand this year.

NativeScript looks really promising. My colleagues have used it for numerous client apps. It's not as mature as Appcelerator Titanium so it doesn't have as many plugins for advanced things like video recording or audio playback but if it continues to get traction, it could become a really good option.

I have been developing cross-platform mobile apps for the past five years, initially on Phonegap and for the last three years, on Titanium (Appcelerator).

If I was starting from scratch today, I'd take a good look at Titanium, React, Xamarin and Ruby Motion (in that order). In general, I think cross platform will save you time and money if you do it properly.

Titanium has been a timesaver for me. My current backend (stocklight.com) is written in Rails. For iOS and Android clients, Titanium gives me about 90% code reuse on the front-end.

ie. It allows you to implement cross platform GUI's using the same view code and you just make platform specific adjustments (eg. Action Bar versus NavigationWindow) where neccessary.

There's no way I would have had time to develop both backend and android/iOS by myself if I had to write everything natively.

Having a single model/controller layer with Titanium has been good also but I recently made the effort to upgrade this part of the project to use Alloy and that has felt very Rails-ish which has been a big improvement.

This week, Appcelerator have announced their new pricing structure ($39 per month) and are pushing a new service called Arrow for managing your back end. Personally, I don't think i'll be using Arrow (Rails seems like a better choice) but it will be great to get LiveView 'instant updates' with their new SDK.

Also, re. speeding up Android development, you should definitely check out Genymotion.

Oh hey, that's awesome, I was under the impression there wasn't any free data sources available. This would make FinTech way more accessible for startups. Which ones do you use?

It'd be interesting to know how much you are paying for your data. If you're doing things legally, balance sheet data and exchange licensing for stuff like this costs 10's of thousands of dollars a year.