Replacing a $3000/mo Heroku bill with a $55/mo server

I guess I'm not quite understanding why you need six staging servers provisioned at $500 a pop? And if you need that because you have a large team...what percentage of your engineering spend is $3000 vs $100k+/yr salaries?

Especially when I got look at the site in question (idealist.org) and it seems to be a pretty boring job board product.

From what I read, they're using them as dev environments. Like running many services at once for a single developer to tie into. That's why they wanted multiple ones, one for each dev.

Yes, everyone forget to compute man-days in the cost calculation

6 staging servers: main, dev, and any branches that you want to let other (non tech people) QA.

As for the staging servers, for each deployment, it was a mix of Performance-M dynos, multiple Standard dynos, RabbitMQ, a database large enough, etc. - it adds up quickly.

Finally, Idealist serves ~100k users per day - behind the product is a lot of boring tech that makes it reliable & fast. :-)

This thinking definitely drives enterprise products, and is exactly what makes it hard for small companies. "You can pay a lot simply because you clearly can afford to" doesn't lead to great products, even if it often does lead to profitable companies.

you're telling me 100k people are looking for jobs in non-profits on your specific site daily? Are you sure you don't have a bot/scraper problem?

Honestly, 100k/day sounds low for Idealist. It's the go-to place for volunteer and non-profit work, which is quite a considerable market.

$3000/month = 36k/year

That's more than 1/3 of the cost of a developer there.

That will save you some week of a person's work to set things up and half-a-day every couple of months to keep it running. Rounding way up.