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2M users but no money in the bank

exercism.org

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Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#131

Post by pico303 »

ocean_moist wrote: post #118

The only way out for something like this to stay afloat is to be subsidized by a big tech company. $7,500 monthly is nothing to a large tech company. It sort of does makes sense for big companies to subsidize this so that the quality and amount of software engineers that join their company increases. This value prop is intangible, but I feel like at least one big company would go for it.

The $7500 jumped out at me, but for a different reason. This seems awfully high for a site with 2 million registered users. I feel like some backend optimization could get than number way down ($1000/mo?).

What is all this computing power going towards?

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#133

Post by charlie0 »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #117

Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $). You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves…

Would $1/month even be worth it? It seems payment processors would take a big chunk out of that $1, which is why I very rarely see monthly subs of that amount.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#134

Post by stavros »

dustincoates wrote: post #126
stavros wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please just add a paid tier before shutting down? Just a $5/mo something that shows a badge on your account, or whatever. Call it something other than "donate", "premium account" or something, and see how many people pick it up. You "only" need 1500 people to do that to cover the costs, which is less than a thousandth of your user base. Even if it gives a few useful features to subscribers, that's better than…

They have a paid tier, called insiders, although you can also "pay" through helping other users on the site: https://exercism.org/insiders

Ah, thanks, I looked for that but didn't find it (the "donate" button reminded me of a one-off). I'd recommend changing the link name to "pricing" and A/B testing the recommended donation amount being $5/mo.

I don't know how much effort they've put into experimenting with pricing, but it'd be worth trying to increase donations, especially for such a well-designed site.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#135

Post by chris_pie »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #117

Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $). You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves…

Don't most payment platforms have a constant minimum fee per transaction? That would hurt you at a $1 price.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#136

Post by whatevaa »

charlie0 wrote: post #133
insane_dreamer wrote: post #117

Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $). You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves…

Would $1/month even be worth it? It seems payment processors would take a big chunk out of that $1, which is why I very rarely see monthly subs of that amount.

Yeah, if you want that little, do Bitwardens $10 a year. $1 transactions are ripe for abuse, checking if cards are active.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#137

Post by giancarlostoro »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #117

Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $). You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves…

Yeah their minimum is $10, which for me, I can only justify if I daily your project, or use it frequently. I love the site, but I don't use it nearly enough to justify this cost. $5 I might forget about. There's a site I rarely use that I pay $3.99 for, because its I'm guessing fees make it not worthwhile, maybe they should negotiate lowered fees from their payment service, or figure out someone else who would give them drastically lower fee rates.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#138

Post by whatevaa »

stavros wrote: post #124
ihid wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're paying ~$1k/month for all our webservers (which is a dozen ECS instances). They're handling about 3,000 requests per second (but that does sometimes massively spike to tens of thousands if not more). We're paying ~$1k/month for all our tooling servers (so the 150 different test runners, representers, analyzers that are used to check peoples code. There's >=1 of those running every second). Bare in mind, we're r…

I don't want to armchair ops your decisions, but maybe do consider moving to some dedicated Hetzner servers, at least for the runners. You can probably reduce that cost tenfold relatively simply.

AWS will charge for network traffic, both in and out. Would need to calculate what is cheaper.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#139

Post by huijzer »

> We've tried a lot of things to change that. We've spoken to hundreds of funders and companies,

The goal isn’t to get investors! It is to get money from customers. A lot of startups seem to get this wrong.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#140

Post by ahstilde »

benreesman wrote: post #15

Where the fuck are the VCs looking at serious hackers with millions of users who haven’t gotten the business model dialed in yet? Y-Combinator says “build something people want”. Two million sounds like a lot of people. I’ve only glanced over this so I could be missing some critical fact, but superficially it sounds like pmarca or pg should write a check before the rest of us stop believing in the startup lottery.

Well, the standard quote leaves out "and will pay for"
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