Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

2M users but no money in the bank

exercism.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

271–280 of 367 posts

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#271

Post by Nextgrid »

dspillett wrote: post #59
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.

If they are self-managing all the extras you get with a decent cloud setup (backups, node failover, load distribution and auto-scaling, multi-region or at least multi-DC for availability beyond single node failures, …), they are going to need an infrastructure person as well as that developer. Preferably two so the one isn't effectively on-call 24/7. And for that multi-DC for availability thing: you might need someon…

Keep in mind that this is a hobby project that is currently bleeding money. No more money is going to be lost if they lose their DB, don't have backups, go down for a week, etc. So a lot of the things you mention aren't really relevant to this case.

What would you prefer, this website eventually shutting down because the donations barely cover hosting costs and there's nobody to maintain it, or the website occasionally going down but otherwise actually being profitable enough that the founder can continue maintaining it on a part-time basis and keeping the site alive?

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#272

Post by paulryanrogers »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #264
charlie0 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You could use crypto for micro-transactions (it's one of the main problems that crypto was meant to solve). LiteCoin, for example, apparently has quite low fees[0] ($0.03-0.04) Monero much less than that. But enabling this in a frictionless manner for users is probably difficult (I don't own crypto myself). [0] https://coinwire.com/cheapest-crypto-to-transfer/

Hasn't LiteCoin mining largely subsided and therefore is subject to 51% attacks?

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#273

Post by Nextgrid »

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.

True, but I wonder what the cost split is. I'd expect the actual "run code from users" bit to be a minor line item, with the bulk being the actual app servers, databases and egress bandwidth.

They can very well keep the REPL/"run code from users" bit on AWS, but serve their actual website, application and database from fixed-price bare-metal servers.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#274

Post by jessriedel »

dmurray wrote: post #202
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…

How does it not "poison the mission" if it means 99% of users drop the platform?

Another alternative is charging $10/month, but allowing students or anyone to request a waiving of fees. They just need to take a minimal speed-bump action to request it, e.g., sending an email once per year. Anyone who isn't willing to do this probably isn't getting much value anyway, and a non-trivial fraction of people (more than 1%) would plausibly pay $10/year just to avoid the speed bump or to support the mission.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#275

Post by jessriedel »

smt88 wrote: post #248
KolmogorovComp wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From TFA, they’re not a business, they’re non-profit.

Nonprofits are businesses.

They aren't. Look it up in the dictionary.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/business

Someone's profession (their "business") can certainly be working at a nonprofit, but that's because they are getting paid. The nonprofit organization itself is not a business. You might be looking for the word "corporation", which can include nonprofits.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#276

Post by xavdid »

Exercism is a great site and I'll be sad if it goes away entirely. It's a really wonderful service and community.

I used it [throughout 2023](https://xavd.id/blog/post/12-languages-in-12-months/) to tour new languages and have been on a deep dive of Rust this year in their [48in24 program](https://exercism.org/challenges/48in24). The UI and tooling is great, there are real humans available to mentor and everything is open source and volunteer driven. They make learning fun and that's no small feat.

Of course, things like this cost money to run, especially when there's so much going on behind the scenes. Sad that the current iteration hasn't worked out financially, but I have every faith in the team that there are good things ahead.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#277

Post by evantbyrne »

Laaas wrote: post #10

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

Cloud providers have gotten really good at selling scale anxiety. Very easy to reach $10k/mo when building on a modern web stack using managed services. Kafka alone could get you there once you factor in multiple environments and add-ons.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#278

Post by evantbyrne »

fendy3002 wrote: post #48
Laaas wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d think they’d use a cheaper hosting service if that’s literally the only thing preventing them from having positive gross profit.

honest questions, is there any ECS-like hosting that's much cheaper?

Docker Swarm. After building a whole CD PaaS for ECS, I came to believe that swarm is a much more reasonable place for teams to start, so I built a free tool for deploying single-machine swarms called Rove. Do your own research though, and remember you don't have to use one tool or platform for everything.

Re: 2M users but no money in the bank

#280

Post by ipaddr »

lanecwagner wrote: post #263

I don't know if iHiD will see this, but this is Lane, the founder of Boot.dev. One of our students shared this article with me, and it really sucks to see. Exercism has always been a go to recommendation of mine for students who need additional practice or to learn languages we don't yet teach. I know you mentioned you don't wanna do ads, which makes sense. But if you're getting 1200 sign ups a day thats worth a lot,…

I agree with the ads model as a way forward where purchasing a membership removes them. The fairest way.
Post reply on HN