2M users but no money in the bank

Post by whatevaa » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 6:32 PM UTC

genewitch wrote: post #127

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've mentioned this before on HN, but we had a single postgres machine primary read/write server that did 4k QPS 24/7. It had DDR ram as storage on a PCIe card, of course, but this was before "SSD" was a thing. It was for a site that hosted portfolios of images, for both people in the images and people who took the images, and such. The front end data (the images and text) was, iirc, 3TB. Sometimes we'd need a server…

Post by insane_dreamer » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 6:34 PM UTC

dartharva wrote: post #142

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…

There will still be plenty of students (mainly from outside of the West) who will immediately lose access if anything gets paywalled by even a cent because of various reasons.

Post by stavros » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 6:35 PM UTC

whatevaa wrote: post #138

stavros wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by gradyfps » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 6:37 PM UTC

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.

Post by datavirtue » Fri, Sep 06, 2024, 6:38 PM UTC

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.