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

Post by jasonm23 » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 4:18 AM UTC

ffsm8 wrote: post #39

tmpz22 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 gl…

Post by immibis » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 6:20 AM UTC

samatman wrote: post #119

immibis wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Post by ggpsv » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 7:19 AM UTC

jwells89 wrote: post #118

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…

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?

Post by mkrd » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 8:38 AM UTC

mherrmann wrote: post #72

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?

Post by majoe » Sat, Oct 19, 2024, 9:06 AM UTC

consteval wrote: post #90

Vegenoid wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's frustrating too because deployment technologies and tools continue to get better and better. It's never been easier to deploy an application + database to some arbitrary computer. You can do it declaratively, no SSH, no random shell scripts, no suspicious fiddling. Also, sidenote: but for small stuff you can just deploy in your home. I've done it before. It's really not that scary, and odds are you have a comput…