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2M users but no money in the bank

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Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#161

Post by ordinaryradical »

ihid wrote: post #71
xrd wrote: post #53

This is one of the saddest posts I've read in a long time. I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment. So, I'm sad it isn't viable. But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess the people behind most of the comments, I would assume…

Thank you for being so kind and supportive. I really appreciate your comment. I'm ok. I'm hopeful for the future. I believe there's lots of amazing stuff we can do and that Exercism has a great future. But right now it's in a hard, low place. The last few months have been pretty tough emotionally, but I think getting to this place is one of acceptance. The only direction now is up :)

I had no idea you were in financial straits and was just using Exercism yesterday to teach myself a new language. I’ve really appreciated the platform and it’s already helped me learn so much.

I’m donating today and I wish you the best.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#162

Post by smt88 »

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…

> Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $

What? No.

If a business isn't able to sustain itself with its revenue, it has failed and will need to shut down. That's the definition of failure.

Lots of things can be "successful" by your metric by using unsustainable pricing.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#163

Post by Lionga »

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.

Move everything to Hetzner (or the like) at double the capacity that AWS has on average and you still spend about 10% of what you spend on AWS.

That is how stupid costly AWS is and 99% of people using AWS are wasting money like there is now tomorrow.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#164

Post by Lionga »

tptacek wrote: post #109
andrewstuart wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$50/month gets you a 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link on Ionos. https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps $7500/month would get them 150 such servers. Maybe they should cut the AWS costs and hire their developer back. Id be really interested to hear the breakdown of their AWS bill. It would be a crime if they were blowing what money they have giving Amazon 9 cents per gigabyte egress.

$7500/mo is less than half of one headcount --- if you could get all hosting for free . This is a sideshow. With these numbers, their viability is not determined by hosting costs. The problem here is that we all have opinions about hosting, but not so many useful opinions about business models, so hosting feedback is what this person is going to get.

$7500/mo easily hires two great 10 yr experience developers in most parts of the world.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#165

Post by Lionga »

pico303 wrote: post #131
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?

It is going straight to Jeff Bezos pocket selling them servers at at 10 to 20 times markup then reasonable

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#166

Post by thinkr42 »

smt88 wrote: post #162
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…

> Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $ What? No. If a business isn't able to sustain itself with its revenue, it has failed and will need to shut down. That's the definition of failure. Lots of things can be "successful" by your metric by using unsustainable pricing.

This entirely. You can't eat using "good feelings" / "impact" alone.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#167

Post by PuffinBlue »

ihid wrote: post #81
Laaas wrote: post #10

How are they managing to spend 7.5k a month in server expenses? Are they using AWS?

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 was curious, so I just checked on one of our customers (I work at a small MSP in the UK) by way of comparison and we have on chugging along happily at more than double those numbers on a $288 Linode dedicated CPU instance. And we're only on that size for ease of disk space handling as the database is several hundred GB. CPU is basically at zero, it's the disk IO that actually gets you on some of these busier databases (from my experience).

RDS is extremely expensive. All managed databases are.

That said, it's a trade off of convenience and being in the AWS bubble, and weighing up the pros/cons of separating out services. Data Transfer is another thing to consider too of course. Sticking your database elsewhere might cost more in egress traffic communicating with it from your other AWS infrastructure. If you're all in on other AWS services, sometimes the RDS price is just worth it when it comes to the total price. Sound like this might be the case for your setup.

I hope you do manage to work things out. The service you have is great.

PS - Side note on RDS sizing. You might already know but sometimes it's worth increasing the storage size on gp3 type storage above 400GB (if you haven't already) as you get 12,000 IOPS baseline against 500MiB/s throughput[0] when you have that much storage. That's 4 times the below 400GB baseline performance but you only pay for the additional storage cost. It can make a difference if you're IOPS constrained or trying to deal with bursty traffic but want to use the smallest instance size possible otherwise to save costs.

[0]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHAP_...

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#168

Post by Lionga »

ihid wrote: post #74
aswerty wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be more interested in active users. I have had personal projects with 100s of registered users yet I was the only one who actually used it. So 2M users might translate to somewhere between 1000 and 10000 unique users per month. Considering the niche; many of them young people with very little discretionary spending money.

We have about 70,000 MAU. People tend to spend an intense few weeks learning a language, then disappear for a year. Then come back and learn another language. A large part of the 2M is still "alive" (I don't know exactly what number that would be, but I'd think around 600k) but Exercism isn't the sort of product you use day-in-day-out.

At 1.500 signups per day (45K a month) 70,000 MAU are horrible retention. Usually you need about 10 times MAU to signups. Unless you can make that happen you have nothing that people actually use and not just try out.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#169

Post by deisteve »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #159
dartharva wrote: post #151

Can't you just add in Wikipedia-style donation request popup/banners for everyone in general? I reckon plenty of people will be willing to spare some change even multiple times when they log on, just like they do with Wikipedia.

If anything Wikipedia as an example of how unsuccessful a voluntary donation model is. 0.2% of people who use wikipedia donate to it. Unless you are doing tens of millions of unique views a month, it's probably not gonna be sustainable. People really hate paying for things. Even things they use and love.

the only way is to lower your operating costs but you are correct ppl on the internet simply do not like paying for stuff even donating is a tough ask.

even getting people to click on affiliate links that won't cost them anything I find is tough as most people remove the referral link or purchase on another device probably out of privacy concerns.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#170

Post by deisteve »

lolinder wrote: post #158
bluepuma77 wrote: post #156

Switch hosting model. Assuming you run expensive cloud services for $7500. Get some inexpensive bare metal servers and you maybe can save 80% cost.

Their model may be one of the few that would truly be quite challenging to pull off with bare metal—running sandboxed code for 73 languages is hard to do economically with any setup, but being able to lean on cloud services for provisioning would make it much more achievable.

ah I see that might be a bit more tricky. I was wondering why the costs were so high.

For example, I serve roughly 3 million users on a $40/month VPS. I only run Postgres + Django, if I use Supabase and all these other fancy cloud SaaS I wouldn't be able to sustain it as the costs would increase 10~20x fold.

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