Since launching Galaxy last month, we’ve received great feedback on how it scales successfully, while eliminating the tricky devops engineering that’s required to operate connected client Meteor apps.

At the same time, we know the current price of Galaxy is out of reach for many members of our community. Our Team, Business, and Enterprise plans are really for production apps that already need scale, high availability, and high-touch support.

That being said, we understand that many developers don’t need all of this. So today we’re taking a small but important step towards giving you the Galaxy you deserve, at prices that make sense for all apps. If you’re one of the many Meteor developers who’ve been waiting to use Galaxy for personal apps or early-stage projects, then we encourage you to request an invitation for Galaxy Developer Edition.

Initially, Galaxy Developer Edition will cost $0.035/GB/hour, which computes to roughly $13 per container per month (initially limited to a maximum 5 x 512 MB containers, spot instances). Developers will be able to deploy Meteor apps to Galaxy with a single command, and run them for small groups of users. You’ll be able to view the past five minutes of metrics tracking the number of connected clients, as well as CPU and memory usage, for your app overall, and for each individual container.

Note this metered pricing structure will only initially apply for Developer Edition users. In early 2016 we plan to rollout a metered billing system for all Galaxy plans. We’re still working through the final details, but our goal is to allow you to pay for what you use, as you’re accustomed to with elastic cloud computing.

We’re going to be sending out many invitations for Galaxy Developer Edition in the next few weeks and months. We wish we could give you all access today but we’re being very disciplined about how we scale our production systems and customer support operations for all our paying customers. We want to make sure that everybody who runs apps on Galaxy has an outstanding experience. That means we need to onboard new customers to the system incrementally, instead of opening the floodgates all at once.

So think of Galaxy Developer Edition as something you can add to your holiday wishlist. If you’re interested in using it, please request an invite. Tell us how you plan on using Galaxy, and you just might find something under a tree…or in your inbox. Happy holidays!

Update: See Galaxy Developer Edition in Action: