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

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

spliit.app

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 167 posts

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

#31

Post by carlosjobim »

aniviacat wrote: post #29
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…

> 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).

That's a given. If you open source your code, other developers will steal it and sell your software. Just like billion dollar tech companies are the main benefiters of open source today, that some guy made for free. Excuse me, I meant for $42 in donations.

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

#32

Post by 9dev »

beeboobaa3 wrote: post #25
horsawlarway wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

And that makes perfect sense. Why should humans inconvenience themselves to please the machine? If anyone’s at fault, it’s the database for not being smart enough to optimize the query on its own.

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

#34

Post by Dachande663 »

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.

I didn't mean it quite so insultingly, but yes, even a very modest server would handle that kind of load easily. You're not particularly high throughput (a few requests per second?) and I imagine the database is fairly efficient (you're not storing pages of text or binary blobs). I think you'd be pleasently surprised by what a little VPS can do.

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

#35

Post by trevor-e »

I've been going down the VPS rabbit hole lately since I have some toy projects I want to host and really don't like the unpredictable pricing model of these "pay as you go" providers like Vercel. E.g. I really love Supabase but it's hard to justify jumping straight to the $25/month plan in combination with Vercel costs.

I was surprised how extremely easy it is to get set up with Coolify on a Hetzner VPS, which has preset install options for NextJS + Supabase + Posthog + many others. And I get the standard autodeploy on commit functionality. The open-source versions are missing some features, and I don't get the slick Vercel admin interface, but for a pet project it works great. I'm also by no means a sysadmin expert, but with ChatGPT it's pretty easy to figure things out now.

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

#36

Post by mxuribe »

npsomaratna wrote: post #13
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…

My understanding is that DO VPS’ are underpowered (as are VPS offerings from most other VPS vendors). Dollar for dollar, bare metal stuff from Hetzner, OVH, etc are far more powerful. That said, I completely agree-a $4/month DO VPS can run MySQL, and should easily handle this load; in fact I’ve handled far bigger loads in practice. On a tangent: any recommendations for good US-based bare metal providers (with a conve…

Hetzner is of course not U.S. based, but has expanded to have 2 U.S. sites (Oregon i think, and Virginia)....so that could be an option maybe. Caveat: i have not leveraged Hetzner in the U.s.....so can not speak to their quality.

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

#37

Post by beeboobaa3 »

9dev wrote: post #32
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace. And that makes perfect sense. Why should humans inconvenience themselves to please the machine? If anyone’s at fault, it’s the database for not being smart enough to optimize the query on its own.

[flagged]

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

#38

Post by singpolyma3 »

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…

To be fair they're not heavily soliciting donations, and even actively say that they don't need them. So it's not surprising people don't prioritise giving anything. Many users probably haven't even thought of it

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

#39

Post by ffsm8 »

tmpz22 wrote: post #21
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…

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 u…

* that's just static files. Even a $4 droplets will hardly ever get into issues serving that, even with hundreds of simultaneous requests.

* Okay, I guess that means we should use 2? So that's $8 now.

* Vercel really doesn't help you there beyond serving static files from cdn. That hardly matters at this scale, you should keep in mind that you "only" add about 100ms of latency by serving from the other side of the globe. While that has an impact, it's not really that much. And you can always use another cdn too. They're very often free for html/js/css

* Burst traffic is an issue, especially trolls that just randomly DOS your public servers for shits and giggles. That's pretty much the only one vercel actually helps you against. But so would others, they're not the only ones providing that service, and most do it for free.

Frankly, the only real and valid reason is the previously mentioned: they've likely got the money and don't mind spending it for the ecosystem. And if they like it... Who are we to interfere? Aside from pointing out how massively they're overpaying, but they've gotta be able to handle that if they're willing to publish an article like this

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

#40

Post by mxuribe »

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…

> ...after experiencing how expensive it really is, you start to look around for alternatives...

One would think that to be the common sense case...but, in corporate America - at least the last handful of companies that i worked at - some companies are *only now just getting work loads up to the cloud now*...so they have not yet felt the cost pain....Or, in other cases, other firms are living in the cloud, have seen the exorbitant costs, but move waaaaay toooo sloooow to migrate workloads off cloud (or hybridize them in smart ways for their business)....Or, in even other cases that i have seen, instead of properly analyzing function and costs of cloud usage - and truly applying an engineering mindset to matters - some of these so called IT leaders (who are too busy with powerpoint slides) will simply layoff people and "achieve savings" that way.

Welcome to being a technologist employed at one of several/many American corporations in 2024!

Post reply on HN