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Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

spliit.app

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Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#21

Post by tmpz22 »

ndriscoll wrote: post #10
scastiel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet? I'd be very curious to see that ;) The web hosting costs basically nothing. Most of the cost comes from the database.

6k visits per week * 5 page views per visit is one view per 20 seconds on average. Even very modest hardware with naively written application code should have no problem handling thousands of CRUD database queries per second (assuming every query doesn't need a table scan or something). Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for all but th…

You're right but I'll play devil's advocate for teaching purposes:

* Usage won't be uniformly distributed and you may need to deal with burst traffic for example when a new version is released and all your users are pulling new config data.

* Your application data may be very important to your users and keeping it on a single server is a significant risk.

* You're users may be geographically distributed such that a user on the other side of the world may have a severely degraded experience.

* Not all traffic is created equal and, especially paired with burst traffic, could have one expensive operation like heavy analytical query from one user cause timeouts for another user.

Vercel does not solve all of these problems, but they are problems that may be exasperated by a $4 droplet.

All said I still highly encourage developers to not sell their soul to a SaaS product that could care less about them and their use case and consider minimal infrastructure and complexity in order to have more success with their projects.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#22

Post by carlosjobim »

Yet another testimony to how utterly few people are willing to pay for what they use in the abuse system called "open source". People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind!

> A short disclaimer: I don’t need donations to make Spliit work. I am lucky enough to have a full-time job that pays me enough to live comfortably and I am happy to give some of the money I earn to the community.

And this is why open source will finally die, because being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations.

A better way to "give back to the community", instead of making open source software, would be to purchase software from other indie developers.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#23

Post by ndriscoll »

rikafurude21 wrote: post #19

For reference, 100 dollars a month gets you this bare metal server on hetzner: Intel® Core™ i9-13900, 64 GB DDR5 ECC, 2 x 1.92 TB ... Should be more than enough to handle 2 requests per minute, could probably handle 100x of that.

My i5-6600k at home can handle ~15k requests per second for a toy social media app with postgresql assembling the xml to send to the client (though I've done some batching optimization and used rust for my application server to hit that). Passmark cpubenchmark suggests a 13900 should be 6-8x more capable than that.

So it should be able to handle somewhere in the ballpark of 2,000,000x the required load, or maybe 100,000x without the application level optimization.

(TLS reduces this by a factor of ~10 if you're doing handshakes each time. Despite what blogs claim, as far as I can tell, if your CPU doesn't have QAT, TLS is very expensive)

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#24

Post by Vegenoid »

diggan wrote: post #4

Do I read something wrong, or does the stats amount to ~400 daily visitors with ~2500 page views per day? That's about ~1.7 requests per minute... And they pay $115/month for this? I'm 99% sure I'm reading something wrong, as that's incredible expensive unless this is hosting LLM models or something similar, but it seems like it's a website for sharing expenses?

I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app.

A more charitable reading is that they pick the technologies that the jobs they want are hiring for, even if they don’t make sense for this simple application.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#25

Post by beeboobaa3 »

horsawlarway wrote: post #20
ndriscoll wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6k visits per week * 5 page views per visit is one view per 20 seconds on average. Even very modest hardware with naively written application code should have no problem handling thousands of CRUD database queries per second (assuming every query doesn't need a table scan or something). Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for all but th…

So many people don't seem to understand how efficient modern machines are. As someone who is literally using old laptops to host things from my basement on my consumer line (personal, non-commercial) and a business line (commercial)... I can host this for under 50 bucks a year, including the domain and power costs, and accounting for offsite backup of the data. I wish people understood just how much the "cloud" is ma…

The problem is that my coworkers are morons who seem incapable of remembering to run a simple `explain analyze` on their queries. They'd rather just write monstrosities that kindasorta work without giving a single damn about performance.

It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#26

Post by jampekka »

carlosjobim wrote: post #22

Yet another testimony to how utterly few people are willing to pay for what they use in the abuse system called "open source". People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind! > A short disclaimer: I don’t need donations to make Spliit work. I am lucky enough to have a full-time job that pays me enough to live comfortably and I am happy to give some of the money I earn to the community. And thi…

If anything is dying it's proprietary software. Which is great for all of us because open source is vastly more efficient system.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#27

Post by fs0c13ty00 »

scastiel wrote: post #3
Dachande663 wrote: post #2

I love the idea of this but, given the traffic numbers, this could run on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet and have the same result. They've burnt over a grand just to use vercel. Maybe I'm just older but I don't understand the logic here. A basic VPS, setup once, would have the same result and would be neutral in cost (it's how I run my own little free apps). Maybe the author is lucky enough that $100/mo doesn't really af…

Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet? I'd be very curious to see that ;) The web hosting costs basically nothing. Most of the cost comes from the database.

My open source service, lrclib.net, handles approximately 200 requests per second at peak (yes you read that right, it's approximately 12000 requests per minute) on a simple €13 Hetzner cloud server (4 AMD based VCPU, 8GB RAM). I'd love to write a blog post about how I made it possible sometime in the future, but basically, I cheated by using Rust together with SQLite3 and some caching.

I was surprised by the cost of Vercel in that blog post too, which is why I dislike all kinds of serverless/lambda/managed services. For me, having a dozen people subscribing to $1-$2/month sponsorship on GitHub Sponsors is enough to cover all the costs. Even if no one donates, I’d still have no trouble keeping the project running on my own.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#28

Post by diggan »

Vegenoid wrote: post #24
diggan wrote: post #4

Do I read something wrong, or does the stats amount to ~400 daily visitors with ~2500 page views per day? That's about ~1.7 requests per minute... And they pay $115/month for this? I'm 99% sure I'm reading something wrong, as that's incredible expensive unless this is hosting LLM models or something similar, but it seems like it's a website for sharing expenses?

I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app. A more charitable reading is that they pick the technologies that the jobs they want are hiring for, even if they don’t make sense for this simple application.

> I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app.

I'm not sure, I'm also "new generation of devs" I suppose, cloud had just entered the beginning of the hype cycle when I started out professionally. Most companies/individuals at that point were pushing for "everything cloud" but after experiencing how expensive it really is, you start to look around for alternatives.

I feel like that's just trying to have a "engineering mindset" rather than what generation you belong to.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#29

Post by aniviacat »

carlosjobim wrote: post #22

Yet another testimony to how utterly few people are willing to pay for what they use in the abuse system called "open source". People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind! > A short disclaimer: I don’t need donations to make Spliit work. I am lucky enough to have a full-time job that pays me enough to live comfortably and I am happy to give some of the money I earn to the community. And thi…

> People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind!

We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source (for their primary products).

> being comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger generations.

edit: remved anecdote

The cost of living will never rise so much that the upper 50% can't easily make enough money. (Otherwise what? The other 150 million people go homeless?)

And unless our industry sees a major shift, which I don't see happening, software engineers will continue being comfortably in the upper 50%.

Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

#30

Post by Vegenoid »

diggan wrote: post #28
Vegenoid wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app. A more charitable reading is that they pick the technologies that the jobs they want are hiring for, even if they don’t make sense for this simple application.

> I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app. I'm not sure, I'm also "new generation of devs" I suppose, cloud had just entered the beginning of the hype cycle when I started out professionally. Most companies/individuals at that point were pushing for "everything cloud" bu…

Certainly, I just mean that we are hitting a point where there can be professional devs, with multiple years of experience at tech companies successfully building software, who have only ever known and worked with a PaaS to deploy an app.
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