$25,000 a month operating costs. Wow. I'd really love to see a breakdown of these costs! It would help so many other entrepreneurs out there.
Codebender is closing down
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Re: Codebender is closing down
#12$25,000 a month operating costs. Wow. I'd really love to see a breakdown of these costs! It would help so many other entrepreneurs out there.
I think they're including salaries in those costs, so i'd guess it's mostly salaries. I'd be surprised if it was more than 2k/month in hosting costs.
Re: Codebender is closing down
#13$25,000 a month operating costs. Wow. I'd really love to see a breakdown of these costs! It would help so many other entrepreneurs out there.
I think they're including salaries in those costs, so i'd guess it's mostly salaries. I'd be surprised if it was more than 2k/month in hosting costs.
I doubt hosting costs are even that high, perhaps even ~1k.
Re: Codebender is closing down
#14Wow, I really enjoyed the cloud-based features of Codebender when I was learning Arduino. At that time, my main Mac was having repairs done and I only had a Chromebook. Codebender IDE worked just fine on the Chromebook and I built many projects on it. I also really enjoyed the hosted libraries feature because I could find the files I needed quickly.
It was a great platform for those getting started with microcontrollers.
Re: Codebender is closing down
#15> We’ll keep the site on read-only mode until December 31st, 2016 at the very least, but our goal is to keep it up indefinitely so long as there is still usage (enough visits to warrant that) and we can spare the resources to maintain & upgrade the servers.
Nice, thank you! Please consider dumping everything under a free license at the end so that it does not just vanish.
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And some cloud snark I cannot resist making:
Work anywhere, your code is always there
Free of charge, forever!
Don't trust other people/companies for being always there, forever!
Re: Codebender is closing down
#16Is it true that makers don't "want" to pay for software or is it because they're so used to software being free?
I guess I'm a maker now. It's not that one $5US/month subscription is going to hurt, it's that there's tens of these kinds of tools. If I subscribed to an online code editor, maybe a graphics editor, a CAD tool, a circuit making tool - that'd add up. Yes it's a contrived example but it's the same issue you see in the video/music streaming space. Everyone's carved out their own little niche so you can't just pay for one service, you're paying over and over again.
Re: Codebender is closing down
#17PlatformIO and their Atom based IDE might be a good alternative for people that don't want to move to the Arduino IDE or want more support for different development boards.
Re: Codebender is closing down
#18$25,000 a month operating costs. Wow. I'd really love to see a breakdown of these costs! It would help so many other entrepreneurs out there.
The fact that they plan to keep things running indefinitely if possible seem to indicate that servers and bandwidth are not the bulk of the cost
So I guess most of it is on paying developers and maybe some office space. 25,000 won't go a long way, even taking in to account cheaper salaries in Greece.
Edit: Their team page says they have 6 employees, so 25,000 probably doesn't go a long way.
Re: Codebender is closing down
#19Is it true that makers don't "want" to pay for software or is it because they're so used to software being free?
Option 3 is that companies don't charge them.
This appears to be a perfect example.
From their pricing: Completely Free - Unlimited public sketches, free of charge, for ever! Only pay if you want to keep your projects private.
Re: Codebender is closing down
#20Is it true that makers don't "want" to pay for software or is it because they're so used to software being free?
Makers aren't interested in paying for software because they don't generally make money off what they make. The key to any business is proving value. For makers, they're already used to providing sweat equity, so to speak. The thought of a little more probably isn't troubling, but paying more money (over and above their investment in hardware and software they weren't able to get to free) is very possibly what pushes…
> Makers aren't interested in paying for software because they don't generally make money off what they make
I'm not sure this is true. Makers will pay money for other tools and materials (some of which are quite expensive) without any expectation that they'll make that money back.
How many of their existing 10,000 monthly active users would be happy to pay for the service?