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Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Just curious, why would I use this instead of Sidekiq, Celery or any other job / background worker service that runs along side my app?

Almost all popular job processing libraries in all major frameworks support executing 1 off tasks with robust retry policies and even support recurring tasks.

The operational complexity is really just running the sidekiq or celery command in another Docker container or if you don't use Docker, then setting up 1 extra systemd unit file.

I once had a Celery / Flask app running on a $20 / month digitalocean server. It handled over 3 million background jobs per month and it also hosted my DB server, cache server and web front end.

On your pricing page, your highest tier supports up to 100,000 requests per month at $129/month. How much would it cost to do 3 million requests per month?

Also how would you set up custom retry policies?

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I understand Posthook may not be the best solution for everyone's scheduled tasks. It seems like for that project you had the expertise, time, and risk tolerance to set up that one DO server to handle all your needs. Other developers may be in a different situation and may find Posthook useful.

> How much would it cost to do 3 million requests per month?

If you want to use Posthook to schedule 3 million requests a month please email support [at] posthook.io and we can work out a special plan and support contract. Do keep in mind that background jobs and scheduled jobs are two different things and what I aim for Posthook to solve are scheduled jobs. I suspect a big part of those 3 million were background jobs.

> Also how would you set up custom retry policies?

The retry policy is fixed at the moment but it seems like this a common request so I want to roll that feature out soon.

Once you have a retry policy, you pretty much by definition have scheduled jobs, so just slap an API on there and you’re all set. (jk)

> I suspect a big part of those 3 million were background jobs.

Yep, almost all of them were tasks that should be executed as soon as possible, but Celery also allows for you to schedule tasks at a future date, and deal with running scheduled tasks at a repeated time (every Sunday at 3am, etc.).

As for the price, I was just curious for the sake of wanting to compare it to the $20 / month DO set up.

Thanks for the answers.

> How much would it cost to do 3 million requests a month?

Hey! Coincidentally at the same time as the OP, I just built a recurring task hook as a service, and I can do 1 request every second (2.6 million per month) for USD$26

You can see that pricing if you plug your requirement (or if you're just curious) into the console[1]. That console is for buying once-off timers.

But I've also made a free API key for people on HN to try out using the API[2]. (those free demo jobs will be capped at 2 weeks no matter what duration is requested tho, and I might end up capping individual timers a certain amount as well, but not yet).

There's also a console for trying out this free API key (which doesn't including pricing/cost info)[3], and I just put this free demo on Show HN[4].

[1] https://pocketwatch.xyz [2] https://dosyago-corp.github.io/pocketwatch-api/ [3] https://api.pocketwatch.xyz/fancy.html [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17353486

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