So that's how vercel makes their money.
Their marketing team needs a raise.
Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
111–120 of 167 posts
Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
#112The inefficiency is bonkers but understandable. I could host this app for like ~$60/year, generously, with little to no devops work. It's painful to see the creator paying out of pocket for such a great project because the Vercel marketing introduced such massive inefficiencies to the ecosystem. Even less when I pay for a dedicated machine running all of my hobby projects. Gratuitous Kamal 2 plug. Run your personal p…
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Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Sorry, I was referring to datapacket.com
Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
#114Earlier 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…
Is this really playing the devil's advocate though? I know this is a simplification but Stack Overflow launched on a couple of IIS servers and rode their exponential growth rather well. Sure they added more than "a couple" of web servers and improved their SQL server quite a bit, but as far as I recall they didn't even shift to CDN until five or six years after they grew. Eventually they moved into the cloud, but Spliit doesn't even have a fraction of the traffic SO did in its early days. As such I don't think any of the challenges you mention are all that relevant in the context aside from having backup. Perhaps also some redundancy by having two $4 droplets?
Is the author even getting paid for their services though? If they aren't then why would they care? I don't mean that as rude as it sounds, but why would they pay that much money so people can use their product for free?
Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
#115I 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.
"that many times". It's nearly zero traffic.
Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I don’t think that the difference is $110/month, but surely reading that you realise there’s a lot more going on there than “point vercel at a git repo and you’re done”. I don’t know how long it would take me to install docker and configure the above, but it’s certainly a few hours. I tried vercel for the first time a few weeks ago, and I had a production ready site online with a custom domain in about 5 minutes.
I’ve commented here before that on AWS (which I’m fairly familiar with) I could set up ECS with a load balancer and have a simple web app with rds running in about 30 minutes, and literally never have to touch the infra again.
Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
#117Re your question on saving costs: If you run it on a single Linux VPS, then I suspect you can get the costs down to 5-10$ 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?
Best I’ve been able to do is around $22 a month on DO, would love to hear alternatives that are cheaper
Pi 5 + Cloudflare
Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
#118I'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…
Spinning up a VPS for things like this is tempting to me too, but not having done significant backend work in over a decade my worry would be with administering it — namely keeping it up to date, secure, and configured correctly (initial setup is easy). What's the popular way of handling that these days?
Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
That's why I make all my software AGPL now. I haven't published any software at all recently. But if I did (anything non-trivial), it would be AGPL. Or even SSPL. Permissive licensing (MIT, BSD, Unlicense, public domain, etc) is a scam to make you work for companies for free - if your software is worth anything to them, that is. They told developers they should use MIT licenses so more people would use their software…
If you don't want to give away software, and it sounds like you don't, then. Don't.
Perhaps you're under the impression that I blindly click the button for a permissive license? No. I read it first. I know what it allows. That's why I choose it.
I think it's nice when companies make money, for the record. Pays for houses, puts food on the table, sends kids to summer camp and college. Some of them even make a lot of money. That's fine too.
If they want to use my software in the process, more power to them. That's why I put my name next to the copyright notice, on a license which says in plain English that they can do that.
Re: Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Best I’ve been able to do is around $22 a month on DO, would love to hear alternatives that are cheaper
Pi 5 + Cloudflare
I run a homelab that isn't too far from this, but I wouldn't recommend it without a few caveats/warnings:
- Don't host anything media-heavy (e.g. video streaming)
- Make sure you have reasonable upload speeds (probably 10+ Mbps min)
- Even behind Cloudflare, make sure you're comfortable with the security profile of what you're putting on the public internet
The min upload speed is mostly about making sure random internet users (or bots) don't saturate your home internet link.