I don't have any knowledge of the inner-workings of either company you listed, but I can tell you from experience its highly unlikely they're running an EC2 instance per customer. That would be very expensive and very weird.
As you say, we don't (founder of https://circleci.com here). Our infrastructure runs on LXC, so we divide up big EC2 machines into about 10-12 containers, and of course it's multi-tenant so if you're not pushing code you're not costing us money.
Most bootstrapped SaaS I know (including mine) do not, indeed, run a dedicated EC2 instance per customer. Some I know do, but it is in the "dedicated / contact us for pricing" option, and the price of the plan makes the EC2 price a detail.
The existence of a company that offers dedicated EC2 instances to their highest tier of customers (and no free trial on that tier FWIW) doesn't meaningfully challenge the GPs assertion.
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I don't have any knowledge of the inner-workings of either company you listed, but I can tell you from experience its highly unlikely they're running an EC2 instance per customer. That would be very expensive and very weird.
As you say, we don't (founder of https://circleci.com here). Our infrastructure runs on LXC, so we divide up big EC2 machines into about 10-12 containers, and of course it's multi-tenant so if you're not pushing code you're not costing us money.
Most bootstrapped SaaS I know (including mine) do not, indeed, run a dedicated EC2 instance per customer. Some I know do, but it is in the "dedicated / contact us for pricing" option, and the price of the plan makes the EC2 price a detail.
its highly unlikely they're running an EC2 instance per customer. That would be very expensive and very weird.
Not so weird: https://www.mongohq.com/pricing/dedicated
Their business revolves around supplying dedicated database servers...
It would be a very weird architecture for the average SaaS product.
The existence of a company that offers dedicated EC2 instances to their highest tier of customers (and no free trial on that tier FWIW) doesn't meaningfully challenge the GPs assertion.