I played with Convox for a while this weekend. I went through the Getting Started with Convox tutorial and then read through some of the code.
While I really like the implementation, The cost still bothers me. From their documentation, the costs today are:
The Convox Installer by default provisions an Elastic Load Balancer and 3 t2.small instances, giving you 6GB of memory capacity. This runs the Convox API and Private Registry, and leaves room for 10 512MB containers.
This configuration costs $85/month according to the AWS simple cost calculator.
Each deployed app will provision an additional ELB which starts at $18/month.
While this isn't insane for a cloud system, it still seems way too cost prohibitive for me. In my perfect world, we'd have this same UI (convox is amazingly easy to use), but also provide cloud administration for free. My current theory to do this would be to run the cloud on Google Compute Engine, with the administration on Google App Engine. The costs would slightly lower since their load balancers are cheaper, and the admin stack could run for free.