How FlightCaster (YC S09) built multi-platform scalable apps on Heroku (YC W08)

I find the non-free options no Heroku to be vastly more expensive than hosting options elsewhere such as Slicehost, Dreamhost and Amazon ECS.<p>They provide a valuable service in terms of taking administration issues out of the picture and letting you just focus on developing your app.<p>But my feeling is this is not targeted at hackers who are surviving on rice and beans but rather those who are more likely to either have well-paying day jobs that can subsidize their startup hobby on the side or have enough VC capital to not bother with the mundane details of hosting administration and its associated time and financial burdens.<p>Not that there's anything wrong with that - Heroku has come up with an ingenious business model because it really does satisfy a need in the vanity hosting market where cost is not an issue - but belonging to the rice and beans category myself at the moment, I just find that I'm sadly not their target demographic - as much fun as it is to use Heroku's free option for little toy apps.<p>Deploying to Heroku really is a delight and I think we will see more services like them start up over the next few years.

Since I know the FlightCaster guys read HN, I'd like to make a suggestion of something I'd love to see.<p>When I take a flight that's not on Southwest and more than an hour in length, I like to do the first-class / business class upgrades when I check in because they aren't that much more expensive (usually $50 to $100 per leg). It's one of my few guilty pleasures.<p>Anyways, it would be pretty cool if there was a way for me to predict which flights have a higher likelihood of having those types of flight upgrades available (which is to say flights that are statistically less likely to have a full first or business class).<p>I have no idea if you guys even have access to that kind of data, but whenever I book travel now I guess as to the likelihood of being able to upgrade on the day.

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that InfoQ interviewed a team of really smart guys doing exciting and challenging (and computationally intensive) data analysis on a sparkly new-ish cloud host that's supposedly doing great things for scalability, and wasted so much time talking about HTML5 and mobile web UI? Aren't there a million web designers out there they can interview instead, or am I just missing something?<p>I know they had a "Part 1" (which my computer is utterly failing to access right now or I'd verify the following), but from what I remember, it was about how they use Clojure, and there's an entire scalability angle to get that I'd rather hear.

<i>We also found that Flightstats was reporting an imaginary airline (Oceanic Airlines).</i><p>I guess someone at Flightstats is a Lost fan.