This a political/economic system failure. How do we design a system that allows for entities like exercism to be funded/supported?
2M users but no money in the bank
181–190 of 367 posts
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
(supabase ceo)
our postgres offering costs roughly equivalent of RDS so if you use it with Django I don’t think you will come close to 20-40x a VPS, ymmv, depending on your workload
We have an Auth service, but since you use Django you wouldn’t need it - sounds like you’d only need postgres (like a lot of our customers)
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#183Earlier 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…
We're not shutting down :) But yes, rather than shutting down, I'd probably just put the whole thing behind a paywall to try and keep it alive.
Well yes, I mean "maintenance mode" or whatever it is. You've built a really valuable service, if you want some help with maybe reducing costs, I'd be happy to have a chat at some point, I have experience in running things on budget hardware.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I'm out of touch with how things have changed over the last year or 2, but 2 years ago you'd struggle to find 1 great dev with 10 YoE for that price ($90K/yr) Even if things have changed now, I can't imagine you'd find a great dev with 10 YoE for less than $80K/yr, and that's hiring globally (with the time zone issues that come with it). You can probably get 1 OK dev and 1 bad dev with 10 YoE for that price tho…
It's not $90k/yr, it's something substantially less, because the fully loaded cost of an employee is much higher than their nominal salary.
I'm assuming you mean more?
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
This entirely. You can't eat using "good feelings" / "impact" alone.
Also the whole non-profit angle is immature in my opinion. Non-profits denote nothing about their financial good-standing or moral good-standing. You can be an amoral non-profit, a moral for-profit or vice-versa. Your profit structure has nothing to do with the morals of the people inside of it. Additionally, there a lot of non-profit executives that are profiting very healthily off of their work.
Non-profit simply tells people what the incentives/motivations are or are not.
The average for-profit company can't be trusted/expected to do what's best for anyone outside the profit structure (e.g. users or the public at large). Of course you can have exceptions in either direction, but on average for-profit orgs will likely be willing to fuck over anyone else to increase profits - intentionally or not - because profit growth is literally their purpose.
'Non-profit' advertises that you don't have to worry about that specific, powerful motivation of the org contending with your best interests.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
This entirely. You can't eat using "good feelings" / "impact" alone.
Not everything beneficial to the world has a viable business model. In the best case, you get to change the world and make a bunch of money. Sometimes, you just have a viable business selling sugar water. And other times, you're doing something really good that's just not going to get you paid. There's nothing wrong with the last thing, other than its potential lack of sustainability. I'm now a teacher; I could easil…
I don't think anyone is arguing that the good feelings aren't worth anything but rather that we are all humans with mouths to feed at the end of the day. If your comp went down 90% or even started costing you substantial money, at some point you too would probably reconsider being a teacher.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#187>Rust does not use a garbage collector, using advanced static analysis to provide deterministic drops instead.
Huh?
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#188The 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?
agreed. this can be optimized by the community. Sometimes, and I'm not saying this happened I am just saying that sometimes engineers have a strong desire to over-engineer and that might be costing money. Also want to add that maybe you can get approved for AWS for startups for example and migrate some compute there.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#189Surprised that a Pluralsight type company wouldn't acquire.
Re: 2M users but no money in the bank
#190What I did once in the very early 2000s was to white label a free platform so that other people could license the software from us for $$$ to pay for our free flsash game platform in 2001.