Thoughts on the new pricing
I just saw the new pricing announcement (BTW you should start a thread with each announcement so we can comment on it directly) and had some thoughts.
I always wondered about the "execution cost" of my operations and how that would affect not just my cost but also you guys. Before you didnt tie how I write my code to the cost of running it. So effectively the incentive for writing high-performance code (using indexes and whatnot) wasnt there, now it is because it contributues to my quota.
So in general I think this is a good thing as it incentivizes you to code in a more efficient manner.
Now what I think is missing from Convex to complete the circle is better tooling to estimate and analyze the performance of your queries, mutations and actions.
The graphs that you give on the dashboard are nice but I think there's a lot more that can be done to help here.
For example; a big issue I have with Postgres and other databases is that my queries work great locally when I only have a few tens of records in my database but as soon as it hits production then that JOIN or AGGREGATE that you did suddenly grinds things to a halt. Or worse it starts slowing down over time and unless you have some APM hooked up like Elastic then you wont know that.
Setting up and understanding Elastic is non-trivial so I think there is definately a lot of room here for Convex to do what you have done for application development but for application monitoring. I want to know if my queries or mutations slow down over time and why they might be slow (ANALYZE EXPLAIN). I want to be emailed / notified when response times are above 100ms for example.
Overall I think the new pricing is fair and good but IMO it would be good to provide further tooling in the future to allow us to know WHY some operations are slow and expensive and if they change over time.
Cheers, keep up all the hard work!
12 Replies
Good feedback! Yep, on our (long) list is a lot better information about profiling, and how to debug what's expensive (both in terms of runtime and cost, since they're ~= )
also, we'd like to get a cost estimator tool eventually as well so you can take things like our new template gallery ( https://www.convex.dev/templates ) and test out how they'd map out to costs on the basis of a certain usage / number of users etc. but yeah, will take time to build all this.
Templates
The backend application platform with everything you need to build your product.
thanks for the great feedback
ye no worries. you guys are doign a fantastic job keep it up!
BTW @jamwt I was wondering have you guys talked about your underlying DB tech anywhere? What is is based on?
we have this old talk I gave at CMU which contains a lot of technical info but is a little outdated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iizcidmSwJ4
CMU Database Group
YouTube
Convex: Life Without a Backend Team (James Cowling)
CMU Database Group - Vaccination Database Tech Talks - Second Dose (2021)
Speakers: James Cowling (Convex)
November 22, 2021
https://db.cs.cmu.edu/seminar2021-dose2#db12
Sponsors:
OtterTune (https://ottertune.com)
Steven Moy Foundation for Keeping it Real (https://stevenmoyfoundation.org)
we also have a "how convex works" blog post/article in the works that goes into the design of convex internally and the motivations behind our design decisions
Awesome thanks I’ll give them a read 🙂
Haha just saw you put my tweet on your new homepage, I was wondering why I suddenly started getting likes again!
BTW image posting seems to be disabled here
awesome talk @james 🙂 love to see a fellow aussie too
That was a perfect Tweet! Thanks for giving us a good one to put on our homepage 🙂
thanks @mikeysee, likewise! looking forward to making it back down south again around the end of the year
Im based in Perth, which side are you from?
We founded Convex while I was in Sydney over Covid (went to visit the family and got stuck for 18 months). Most of us are San Francisco these days, with a smaller offer in New York
Cool 🙂 I have just taken a fairly large bet on Remote being a thing for a while as I am moving down to busselton (3hrs south) in a month. Fingers crossed it stays that way!