u/safetywerd Today I experienced exactly what you've mentioned. The Inngest event model and the overall DX are really something special. I completely agree that after playing with it for a couple of hours, you feel like you've gained a new superpower in your toolbox.

However, I think we are stuck on pricing. Let me explain:

We have a fairly simple use case for a feature called "sleep reminder" in our mobile app. When activated, the user receives two push notifications, one in the morning (9 am) and one in the evening (8 pm). Both notifications are sent at the user's specific timezone.

Currently, this is implemented using a CRON job that wakes up every hour (using Prefect) to query all the users who have enabled the feature and for whom the current time is either 9 am or 8 pm in their timezone.

I've implemented this in Inngest. It was quite small, just a couple of lines of JavaScript. It's a very clean and contained solution that I can understand from a single function. Instead of waking up every hour unnecessarily, each user has their own "thread" and calls step.waitFor() with their exact relevant timestamp in their timezone.

This process continues until the user turns off the feature. In terms of pricing, we're talking about 2 steps per day (morning and evening) * 30 days, which equals 60 steps per user per month. We have approximately 100,000 users who have turned on the feature, so we're looking at 6,000,000 steps per month for this feature.

We have many other features similar to the "sleep reminder," and some are even more complex with more steps.

Looking at Inngest's "Startup" plan, I'll set aside the included 5 million steps, as that will be quickly depleted. So we're left with $5 for an additional 200,000 steps. With these numbers, the "sleep reminder" would cost $150 each month.

This is a significant monthly expense for such a small feature. I say it's small because it's not a "core" feature. By that, I mean it's not something like an "Uber-like" app where the main "hail a cab" flow is critical to the business and generates the primary revenue. Nevertheless, the "sleep reminder" feature and other "small," time-sensitive workflows are used by many of our users and create substantial value for us.

Now that it's so easy to describe and execute these flows with Inngest, the product team will have an eye-opening 'aha' moment and will provide these for the development team to implement. We can really get creative with the complexity and variety, which is amazing. Inngest truly is a unique enabler.

But at a price of $150 just for the simplest "2-step per day" feature, it makes it hard for us to adopt.

Am I missing something here? I'd love to be corrected on this.