Re:Ask HN: How to come up with monetizable side project ideas?
by x0x0 on Saturday September 22, 2018 @09:14PM
(#18048888)
I think gp is referring to the ongoing effort to keep an app up, running, and secure; not any feature of the platform.
You can of course buy Rails LTS (though from a quick glance the pricing can be very expensive if you have eg a deploy per tenant rather than multitenant). But gems move on from your version, apis change underneath you, etc.
Keeping a moderately complex rails using say 100 gems with okta + google SSO and various other integrations up and running on a permanent basis can easily consume 1/2 a ft engineer.
So if you're in possession of an app that earns say $150k/year, you have to decide if you want to put that half eng year in or if there are more productive ways to spend your time.
This is even more painful if you bet on, for example, a javascript framework that fell out of fashion.
With few exceptions, browsers and servers support the same things they did when the web began. Your old server-rendered Perl app might look a bit long in the tooth in 2018, but there's no reason you can't run it exactly the way you describe.