It's really amazing how the world of software development has evolved. The proliferation of platforms is incredible. I'm glad I started my career in the stages before open source changed everything, because it is nice to appreciate the differences.
A few months back I started a project with a friend. I got an account for hosting the application from a company named slicehost for $20 per month. I set up a source control repository on a service called github for $7 per month.
$27 per month total cost for developing and hosting a service is pretty darn cheap.
This past week, we ported the application so that it could run on Google App Engine (GAE), which is a web application hosting platform from Google. The cost until you get to some pretty fair amount of usage is $0. Beyond that it's pay-as-you-go with limits that you can set, so you set your budget.
At the same time, we decided to change the source control from using a tool named 'git' to a tool named 'mercurial' and in the process moving from github to bitbucket.org. At bitbucket.org, the level of functionality we need right now is also $0.
What's even better is that in both cases the price not only goes to $0, but the services improve. In the case of GAE you get an infrastructure that is operationally scalable. In the case of bitbucket.org, mercurial is easier to use than git.
What a world.
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