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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

#71

Post by aniviacat »

carlosjobim wrote: post #31
aniviacat wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

When I write open source libraries I consider the ones benefitting to be the general public.

Even if my libraries were used only by mega corporations (which they aren't) there would still be a benefit to the public: If companies have lower cost, they will charge lower prices, benefitting customers / the general public. (And yes, they will lower prices. Most markets are not monopolies.)

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

#72

Post by mherrmann »

Re your question on saving costs: If you run it on a single Linux VPS, then I suspect you can get the costs down to 5-10$ per month.

One thing I find interesting is the growth chart: It's linear. But given that the app clearly has some traction, and is viral in nature, how come it isn't exponential?

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

#73

Post by quesera »

carlosjobim wrote: post #65
renewiltord wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you the guy with the https://osspledge.com/ billboards around San Francisco? Haha. They’re funny. I enjoyed the art. If it’s actually you, I’d be curious who the illustrator is or if you used generative AI.

I'm not that guy, I'm against open source and free loading. Why would multi million dollar CEOs give anything to FOSS programmers when they're developing their crucial infrastructure for free? Work for free for huge companies so they can make billion dollar profits while at the same time demanding unionization. Refusing to sell your work to consumers who are willing to pay, yet happy to provide free tech support to f…

> What's the logic?

Some of us like making things, and are happy to share our excess production with the world.

Like any other good work, it does not require acknowledgement or reciprocation, and the benefits are not part of a zero-sum economy where the giver is harmed by any action of the receiver.

You're on record as being vehemently anti-OSS. Why does it offend you so much that other people prioritize forms of compensation differently than you do?

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

#74

Post by LVB »

I'm always curious what folks use for their database for things like this. Even though I like SQLite--a lot--my preference has become that the app is generally separate and mostly stateless. Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I like being able to expand/replace/trash the app infra at will with no worries.

Thought about maybe running a Postgres VPS, but I've enjoyed using neon.tech more than I expected (esp. the GUI and branching). I guess the thing that has crept in: speed/ease is really beating out my ingrained cheapness as I've gotten older and have less time. A SaaS DB has sped things up. Still don't like the monthly bills & variability though.

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

#75

Post by Vegenoid »

joshdavham wrote: post #69
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.

> new generation of devs being raised in the cloud I unfortunately sorta put myself in this category where my PaaS of choice is Firebase. For this cost-splitting app however, what would you personally recommend if not Vercel? Would you recommend something like a Digital Ocean Droplet or something else? What are the best alternatives in your opinion?

Yes, I believe a Droplet or VPS (virtual private server) from some other provider would be sufficient. Digital Ocean isn't the cheapest, but it's pretty frictionless, slick, and has a lot of good tutorial articles about setting up servers.

You'd have a Linux machine (the VPS) that would have at least 3 programs running (or it is running Docker, with these programs running inside containers):

- Node.js

- the database (likely MySQL or PostgreSQL)

- Nginx or Apache

You'd set up a DNS record pointing your domain at the VPS's IP address. When someone visits your website, their HTTP requests will be routed to port 80 or 443 on the VPS. Nginx will be listening on those ports, and forward (aka proxy) the requests to Node, which will respond back to Nginx, which will then send the response back to the user.

There are of course security and availability concerns that are now your responsibility to handle and configure correctly in order to reach the same level of security and availability provided by a good PaaS. That's what you're paying the PaaS for. However, it is not too difficult to reach a level of security and availability that is more than sufficient for a small, free web app such as this one.

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

#76

Post by mminer237 »

diggan wrote: post #16
npsomaratna wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> good US-based bare metal providers The times I've needed it, DataPacket (not based in US, but has servers in the US) and Vultr (based in the US) have both been good to me.

In a trademark travesty, I must ask DataPacket.com or DataPacket.net?

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

#78

Post by bdlowery »

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.

https://f5bot.com/ was free for like 8 years and it processed hundreds of thousands of db records a day, and it barely cost anything.

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

#79

Post by mtlynch »

LVB wrote: post #74

I'm always curious what folks use for their database for things like this. Even though I like SQLite--a lot--my preference has become that the app is generally separate and mostly stateless. Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I like being able to expand/replace/trash the app infra at will with no worries. Thought about maybe running a Postgres VPS, but I've enjoyed using neon.tech more than I expe…

>Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I like being able to expand/replace/trash the app infra at will with no worries.

Have you used SQLite with Litestream? That's the beauty of it. You can blow away the app and deploy it somewhere else, and Litestream will just pull down your data and continue along as if nothing happened.

At the top of this post, I show a demo of attaching Litestream to my app, and then blowing away my Heroku instance and redeploying a clean instance on Fly.io, and Litestream ports all the data along with the new deployment:

https://mtlynch.io/litestream/

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