331–340 of 367 posts
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> Are they using AWS? Yes!
You’d think they’d use a cheaper hosting service if that’s literally the only thing preventing them from having positive gross profit.
It’s clearly not if the founder isn’t taking a salary and they just had to lay off their only employee..
This is one of the saddest posts I've read in a long time. I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment. So, I'm sad it isn't viable. But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess the people behind most of the comments, I would assume…
By any chance do you also donate?
For only 2M registered (not even monthly) users? Tell me you are using AWS without telling me you are using AWS.
Let's think about their heaviest workload, which is likely running user-submitted code server-side to test those exercise submissions. Say it's really bad performance-wise and costs 1s of single-core CPU time per submission. 45m submission gets us 520 days of CPU time.
I'm going to go out on a limb and claim their entire site could run off a $50/month dedicated server, and it would be unimpressed.
This is one of the saddest posts I've read in a long time. I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment. So, I'm sad it isn't viable. But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess the people behind most of the comments, I would assume…
Thank you for being so kind and supportive. I really appreciate your comment. I'm ok. I'm hopeful for the future. I believe there's lots of amazing stuff we can do and that Exercism has a great future. But right now it's in a hard, low place. The last few months have been pretty tough emotionally, but I think getting to this place is one of acceptance. The only direction now is up :)
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Thank you for being so kind and supportive. I really appreciate your comment. I'm ok. I'm hopeful for the future. I believe there's lots of amazing stuff we can do and that Exercism has a great future. But right now it's in a hard, low place. The last few months have been pretty tough emotionally, but I think getting to this place is one of acceptance. The only direction now is up :)
I submitted the article to HN after reading it and I have joined the Exercism Insiders - recurring $10/month, a very fair deal. Hope that has helped a bit! As someone already mentioned please consider adding ways for monetizing, ads + remove ads, paywall, paid exercises, etc. to stay afloat. Also please get in touch, email in bio, I don‘t have anything concrete in mind but would like to be in touch. In another life I…
Sounds like a very useful service. I just signed up. Did you consider to inform new users that the service is financed by donations? You seem to focus on "always free" which is nice but I guess most people are also ok to pay some money if your service is useful to them. I guess this might drive some more donations if people knew that you need money. Also a banner like Wikipedia (maybe a bit less annoying) would work.
out of money, final payroll, no alternative but to go into zombie mode, yet for the last few months the co-founder has been working on his next product which will launch in 2025. maybe everything that could have been tried was tried but this comes off like some of the effort spent working on the next company could have been spent keeping this one alive
> but this comes off like ... You don't know more about the company than them. Most likely they saw this coming months ahead of time, and needed to figure out how to pay their own rents after actual doomsday and needed to pre-emptively start figuring out what's next. Founders who don't start with a pre-existing financial cushion have very, very little job security if they underpay themselves and their businesses shut…
This is one of the saddest posts I've read in a long time. I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment. So, I'm sad it isn't viable. But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess the people behind most of the comments, I would assume…
Maybe you can reopen a free tier later, but for now you are in panic mode.
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Would $1/month even be worth it? It seems payment processors would take a big chunk out of that $1, which is why I very rarely see monthly subs of that amount.
Some payment processors have "micropayment" fee structures, where they take a higher % (5% in PayPal's case) for a lower fixed fee per transaction. PayPal's traditional fee (for USD)[1] = 3.49% + $.3, for $1 = $0.3349 PayPal's micropayment fee (for USD)[2] = 4.99% + $.09, for $1 = $0.1349 Using that model would make sense in OP's case. [1]: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#statemen... [2]: https://…