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Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

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Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#91
post #43

Friendly suggestion: make the pricing easier to find. Right now, the only link is in small print at the very bottom of the home page.

A lot of products with a free tier do this. The pricing is often in the footer though, so it's pretty standard (albeit hidden).

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#93
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7% on hosting revenue sounds like a great accomplishment but what's relatively a good ratio to look at?

So what is normal in the SaaS world? I am at 5% today, and I try but not focus on costs. Around 5% it seems hard to care TOO much...

We're at ~10% and are just starting to care. We're looking at some infrastructure changes to bring us closer to 4%.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#94
post #46
post #36

Is it me or is it nuts to be paying $1,600 a month on servers when you have just over 1000 users? Seems like something that could be run on a $50-$100 VPS.

Yeah there's definitely some weird engineering decisions there. I think maybe we just don't have all the information. But I guess this is another example of why that stuff just doesn't matter when you're growing your business.

I don't think its a weird decision at all. They support almost 50 editors and are likely to add more.

If you were to port the entire application to each editor's idiosyncratic plugin API, it would be a huge scaling issue for them.

Instead, if you make your application standalone and multiplatform and then turn the plugins into thin controllers to connect the IDE and the application, you save yourself a whole lot of development time.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#95
post #36

Is it me or is it nuts to be paying $1,600 a month on servers when you have just over 1000 users? Seems like something that could be run on a $50-$100 VPS.

We don't know the full stack powering this and there are 100K users/month. There have been a lot of great points in reply to this and I would like to add that part of this cost may be to help perception. A service like this that feels/is slow can die pretty quickly if the perception of the service is that it doesn't work as well as it should.

100k is not a lot. at all.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#96
post #89
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While, as others have pointed out, that with 100k non-paying users the $1,600 figure makes more sense. Your example still makes no sense to me, what are you _actually_ doing with all that server power?

Can't speak for xstartup, but if the dataset is 100+ GB then EBS, S3, etc start to cost real money. I host an application on AWS for a single customer with 10 active users which costs about $1500/month because there are several TBs of data and the nature of the application needs a lot of CPU and RAM. In other words, it depends on the use case and data size.

What? I have a 16TB raid that only costs 800$ a month. You should look into how you store that information.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#97
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While that makes for a great anecdote, there are action-oriented people should not be heeding that advice. An appropriate balance between rational ignorance and analysis paralysis must be struck. Otherwise, it's left to others to deal with your predisposition towards an extreme.

Well yes, no quote applies perfectly for all situations, but IMHO there so much time being wasted on getting to know all the theoretical intricacies of startups without getting anything out there that this quote is great advice for many.

Not with startups, but I'll admit to this fault for myself with technical content. I spent (I won't say wasted, I enjoyed it) a lot of time learning more theoretical areas of CS and software engineering without a need to apply it. The breadth of knowledge has proven useful in general, but often long after the reading and required some effort to relearn and apply properly. I would've been better off with more of a survey of the same topics (which could've meant surveying more topics in the same span) and then learning the details when I needed it.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#98
post #50
post #36

Is it me or is it nuts to be paying $1,600 a month on servers when you have just over 1000 users? Seems like something that could be run on a $50-$100 VPS.

That's the number of users who are paying. He mentions that he has over 100K total users. That raises an issue with this sort of model that I've never really understood: if only ~1% of users are paying, it seems like very small changes in conversion rate could make or break the business. Suppose the conversion rate goes down by just 0.3%. That would be a 30% reduction in revenue while you still have to run the infras…

> only ~1% of users are paying, it seems like very small changes in conversion rate could make or break the business.

Agreed. 4% to 5% seems to be the minimum for this sort of model to sustain and not die.

> Chris Anderson in his book “Free” explains that Freemium works on the 5 Percent Rule - where 5% of premium customers support the remaining 95% of free users and also the cost of servicing the 95% is close to zero.

Source: https://www.chargebee.com/blog/freemium-business-model/

When Dropbox launched they were surviving on their 4% of users who had converted from free subscription. Now their conversion rate is around 25% which is very impressive for a fremium product / service.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#99

I must voice concerns regarding this product. Just took a look at the Notepad++ plugin ( https://github.com/wakatime/notepadpp-wakatime ), because this is something I know a lot about. To begin with, it sends filenames to the mother ship instead of just the programming language. I would consider filenames to be sensitive information giving a very good idea of the project you are working on... Also problematic is the…

Perhaps you could encrypt the filenames with a user-supplied password hash. Upload and store just the encrypted filenames, and when the user is viewing the data on the web can decrypt the filenames by asking them for the filename password. You could run analytics on the encrypted data still, and not expose filenames to even wakatime.

Re: Reaching $10k monthly revenue with WakaTime, my SaaS side project

#100
post #43

Friendly suggestion: make the pricing easier to find. Right now, the only link is in small print at the very bottom of the home page.

I've always hated this design choice. I understand the purpose, but it's always seemed a bit underhanded to me.
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