Running costs for running a web app • Hacker News Board

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#171

Post by destroytoday » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 2:39 AM UTC

e12e wrote: post #164

Eridrus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you assume that all users are paying monthly (not unreasonable, the $2/month savings are tiny vs getting locked into $96/yr), then they only have about 600 users since they're charging each of them once a month (hence the 7k billing events).

It's a 20% discount for a time/budget management/forecast solution that I don't think makes much sense to stop using every other month -- so I'd be surprised if most that go from free trail don't convert to yearly subscription? (They could of course have 600 different users each month, and be failing due to big churn with their customers...)

The majority of paying users are monthly, but mostly because of the demographic—freelancers. Most freelancers aren't full-time freelancers, so they don't always freelance (and don't always need a freelancing tool). That makes churn the biggest challenge. I follow up with users who leave and have learned that they either don't have a lot of freelance gigs at the moment and plan to come back, or they took a full-time job.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#172

Post by tuananh » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 2:41 AM UTC

M2Ys4U wrote: post #94

Almost 10% of costs on fonts ? WTF?

it's a one time thing i think.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#173

Post by jggonz » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 2:41 AM UTC

sethd wrote: post #42

jggonz wrote: post #6

This seems ok given that the startup has generated approximately $60,000 in stripe revenue. I would try to reduce costs in those Heroku workers... $175/month seems steep.

It says they are spending $74.40/month on Heroku workers.

Thank you for noticing this. The $175/month came from the intercom services. Given that support is likely his main selling point, I think $175 is perfectly fine for the added functionality.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#174

Post by swatthatfly » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 2:47 AM UTC

misiti3780 wrote: post #57

This is the first time I have ever heard of Papertrail. I really hate loggly and am looking for a better option - can anyone shed any light on if this is a good option ? Which log aggregation services is everyone using ?

We used Papertrail for about 1 year. It works for fairly well for basic reporting, but it gets pretty expensive once you have enough volume. We moved to Logstash, Elasticsearch and Kibana. The power to aggregate, digest, and search the logs from various apps is quite awesome.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#175

Post by nickpsecurity » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 2:49 AM UTC

e12e wrote: post #167

nickpsecurity wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get an engineer in my model: you usually share one with others. Someone who throws together this stuff all the time usually has premade images, scripts, checklists, etc that make it very efficient. You become one of their many customers. This might be a person or a firm. It's just one that focuses on great cost-benefit as differentiator. So, one $30-50k engineer gets split 5-10 ways on infrastructure. Most…

I'm curious - do you have first hand experience with companies that does this (and does it well)? I might want to work (at first part time, remote) for such an outfit, if I they provide a good service (and good/skilful colleagues). I've seen a lot of people that hire devops in-house (technically, it's a little hard to see how "devops" might work with the "ops"-person just doing drive-by installation and maintenance o…

I used to do it myself and know people who do. None of us are or were in DevOps. Plenty of independents out there that might make same arrangement. We did it just to save us time and make extra money. :)

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#176

Post by nickpsecurity » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 2:50 AM UTC

jsmeaton wrote: post #168

nickpsecurity wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get an engineer in my model: you usually share one with others. Someone who throws together this stuff all the time usually has premade images, scripts, checklists, etc that make it very efficient. You become one of their many customers. This might be a person or a firm. It's just one that focuses on great cost-benefit as differentiator. So, one $30-50k engineer gets split 5-10 ways on infrastructure. Most…

Out of curiosity, can you name some of these firms that contract out these kinds of engineers?

Reply here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10878468

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#177

Post by jggonz » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 2:54 AM UTC

destroytoday wrote: post #14

jggonz wrote: post #6

This seems ok given that the startup has generated approximately $60,000 in stripe revenue. I would try to reduce costs in those Heroku workers... $175/month seems steep.

Hi! I run Cushion. Moving off Heroku is definitely high on my to-do list. So far, since I'm a solo dev, I've taken the mindset of paying for convenience services that would allow me to spend more time working on the app. Now, I'm getting into the phase where I can start reducing these costs and transition to a system that doesn’t induce fear when I need to add another server. Right now, I have two web workers and two…

Thanks for the reply. I think you're doing great. Keeping your focus on the core components of your product is probably the best thing you are doing for your business.

I also want to say that your site has a great design. Are you doing that yourself or would you mind sharing the service you're using?

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#178

Post by destroytoday » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 3:01 AM UTC

jggonz wrote: post #177

destroytoday wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi! I run Cushion. Moving off Heroku is definitely high on my to-do list. So far, since I'm a solo dev, I've taken the mindset of paying for convenience services that would allow me to spend more time working on the app. Now, I'm getting into the phase where I can start reducing these costs and transition to a system that doesn’t induce fear when I need to add another server. Right now, I have two web workers and two…

Thanks for the reply. I think you're doing great. Keeping your focus on the core components of your product is probably the best thing you are doing for your business. I also want to say that your site has a great design. Are you doing that yourself or would you mind sharing the service you're using?

Thanks! I do all the design, too. I went to school for design and I've been coding all my life—it's a useful balance.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#179

Post by somberi » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 3:21 AM UTC

fareesh wrote: post #157

At our agency we tend to have a lot of low budget projects, plus we like to keep expenses low if there's a relatively small overhead in return. For saving on costs we use: - Bitbucket over Github (Private repos are free, although Github has more features, so it depends on how much you use really) - Email Hosting Zoho over Google (FREE): We tend to recommend Zoho to single entrepreneurs since it offers 10 accounts for…

One can get 15 free accounts in Zoho (10 de-facto + 5 extra), if you can refer another business. Both parties get 5 extra users. Helpful for info@, jobs@, privacy@ etc.

Re: Running costs for running a web app

#180

Post by applecore » Mon, Jan 11, 2016, 3:25 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #169

Running a business is much, much more expensive than you'd expect if you've never done it before. I started one on $60 so I get the mindset which has people suggesting that this story represents prolifigate spending, but oh my goodness, it's practically a shoestring . There is an individual thing in the AR deployment which exists for no technical purpose to get us a piece of paper issued by Rackspace which we need fo…

What's more remarkable is the number of services and integrations that are necessary to keep a SaaS product running. Even on a shoestring budget, that's a lot of complexity to manage.