Great project and writeup! But I think a one-time fee makes very little sense for a hosted SaaS product, and you should definitely switch to recurring billing. Instead of a one-time fee of $29, I think you could charge $3 per month, or $29 per year (20% discount.) You could also charge more for larger teams.
Great writeup. And, if the author is here, congrats on profitability!<p>As a tip for other aspiring bot developers, though.<p>I've been writing a lot of bots lately and I've been convinced that for Slack bots Serverless really is the way to go. Pay for what you use, no infrastructure to run, and mostly seamless scaling.<p>I know the infrastructure is already lean based on this article but with AWS Lambda and DynamoDB each user would be pennies a month.[1] Profitability would only require about 1 user.<p>Ultimately, though, the most important thing is to launch and if RoR gets you their fastest or offers some features that are critical to your app and can't be done in serverless then that is what you should do.<p>[1] When you consider the DynamoDB free tier. Which I'd venture you can get to a huge number of users before exhausting your free tier with a chat bot.
Great idea but weird examples given.<p>> I know you've been stealing my sandwiches.<p>Doesn't this kind-of defeats the purpose? It's pretty clear who is who in this scenario.
Interesting project. The only thing that really came to mind is since the messages are deleted on their server, could someone use it as a way to harass to a colleague leaving the company unable to take any action because it would be 100% anonymous.
You can maybe save the 9$/month by replacing PostgreSQL with a more generous cloud database. Maybe Cloudant (<a href="https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloudant/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://www.ibm.com/cloud/cloudant/pricing</a>) or Firestore (<a href="https://firebase.google.com/pricing/" rel="nofollow">https://firebase.google.com/pricing/</a>).<p>You should also check out the lambda services of google/azure/aws/webtask.io, maybe they are cheaper for your usage than the $7/month you are paying Heroku for the dyno.
I was surprised by the one time purchase model.
When I see that many other bots are charging by user per month.<p>What are you thoughs on the by user/month model ?
Example 1$ per active user per month vs fixed amount per month ?
Seems like this could lead to a lot of trolling, harassment, and false flags. As humorous as I find the guy fawkes avatar I would pass on this for my own workplace.
Excellently simple and well executed idea! I also plan to go global with some tiny for fun&profit side-projects. I agree, it is not easy job with our EU VAT MESS laws so I look for some all-in-one solution too. I wonder if you had a chance to compare Paddle with FastSpring in any way?
"Rails" is in the title, but there isn't really anything in the article about what the advantages of using Rails for a Slack bot are. What have been people's experience using Rails for this kind of app?
Very interesting article and it gives me hope that creating a couple of decent APIs or bots can return a reasonable passive income that could make it easier to switch jobs in the future or enjoy an extra vacation a year.