Does anyone know their bussiness model?
Cost of serving billions of images per month
21–30 of 138 posts
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#22I’m stunned that a business of this size would still be using Heroku. Heroku’s sweet spot (to me at least) is for anyone with less than 3-4 servers. After that, it just becomes so expensive there’s no rationalization in the world that makes sense.
Moreover what if Heroku goes out of business? Then they’re f’d. Hosting on k8s, using Terraform or whatever would give them a lot of automation and provider independence.
I’m guessing I’m being grayed because I’m suggesting Heroku might go out of business? Ok let me explain. That is one scenario, it’s unlikely but there might be other similar scenarios that pose risk being tied in to one providers stack. DDOS, TOS issues, simply out growing them, Heroku themselves having TOS issues with their cloud. There are almost weekly posts on HN of “this major service is down” and “that major service is down”.
I understand a scrappy startup needing to focus on growth and using the most convenient tools, but once you’ve been around a bit it’s time to think of boring stuff like what if stuff goes wrong. It might be technical, security related, business related or political. Eliminating SPOFs is wise.
Happy for you to downvote this but if you do please drop a sentence to say why I’m wrong. I’m happy to be proved wrong it helps me learn.
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#23I’m stunned that a business of this size would still be using Heroku. Heroku’s sweet spot (to me at least) is for anyone with less than 3-4 servers. After that, it just becomes so expensive there’s no rationalization in the world that makes sense.
Moreover what if Heroku goes out of business? Then they’re f’d. Hosting on k8s, using Terraform or whatever would give them a lot of automation and provider independence.
Can we please, please, please kill the myth that Terraform in any way helps in any way with provider independence?
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#24What's the business model here? We would never run with such expensive options for this functionality, especially if it was a free/donations powered service. This company raised $7.5M though: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-seri...
They also have extensive partnerships with certain brands — their homepage currently serves ads disguised as content from a handful of companies.
(I say this as a user of and contributor to Unsplash)
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#25> We continue to use Heroku as our main web platform. Despite its premium cost over AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, Heroku’s built-in deployment and configuration tools allow our team to move faster, more confidently, and more reliably. This is just bullshit, really. I'd buy this excuse from a service like Snapchat/Facebook in their early years, but unsplash is nothing that changes dramatically all the time. Every sing…
> They could easily save 60% on their monthly bill. That would enable them to hire 1 or 2 engineers capable of maintaining a few dozen servers on AWS, DO or GCP. If they reduce their bill and then hire engineers to do the same job they've gained nothing other than an increased headcount for no discernible benefit.
If they're not really adding features then its the same staff. Not every change needs a new developer.
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#26What's the business model here? We would never run with such expensive options for this functionality, especially if it was a free/donations powered service. This company raised $7.5M though: https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/15/unsplash-simple-token-seri...
They are probably banking on the Pinterest model. Eventually you will see a picture of the couch and a link that couch from your nearby store. Very profitable business at a scale, even if individual conversions are small.
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#27> We continue to use Heroku as our main web platform. Despite its premium cost over AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, Heroku’s built-in deployment and configuration tools allow our team to move faster, more confidently, and more reliably. This is just bullshit, really. I'd buy this excuse from a service like Snapchat/Facebook in their early years, but unsplash is nothing that changes dramatically all the time. Every sing…
1 or 2 engineers is not enough to fully resource a 24x7x365 on-call roster. Sure, $42k/month seems like a lot of money, but proposing to hire 2 engineers to replace that seems naive to me. If you need to build/run/maintain a service that doesn't stay dark all weekend if something breaks at 6pm on a Friday, you need more than two people who're prepared to answer their phone on weekends.
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#28$99K/month in hosting costs and no visible source of revenue...
I think this baby is ready for an IPO!
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#29it would be nice if each category would line up in this graph: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/2400/1*Bvw2zcdE146WaXB7i... ... kinda hard to read as-is
Re: Cost of serving billions of images per month
#30It’s interesting to see how so many people here focus on specific line items on their costs. What it comes down to is management focus. It’s a lot easier to switch a CDN than to lay off two engineers as needs change.
I Do wonder why they don’t charge for API at all as even currency APIs charge and that is effectively public knowledge.
Very interesting though as this is some serious scale indeed...