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

spliit.app

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

#41

Post by npsomaratna »

mxuribe wrote: post #36
npsomaratna wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that DO VPS’ are underpowered (as are VPS offerings from most other VPS vendors). Dollar for dollar, bare metal stuff from Hetzner, OVH, etc are far more powerful. That said, I completely agree-a $4/month DO VPS can run MySQL, and should easily handle this load; in fact I’ve handled far bigger loads in practice. On a tangent: any recommendations for good US-based bare metal providers (with a conve…

Hetzner is of course not U.S. based, but has expanded to have 2 U.S. sites (Oregon i think, and Virginia)....so that could be an option maybe. Caveat: i have not leveraged Hetzner in the U.s.....so can not speak to their quality.

That’s news thank you. I’ll check this out.

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

#42

Post by ndriscoll »

9dev wrote: post #32
beeboobaa3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that my coworkers are morons who seem incapable of remembering to run a simple `explain analyze` on their queries. They'd rather just write monstrosities that kindasorta work without giving a single damn about performance. It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace.

> It seems like computers are getting more capable, but developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same pace. And that makes perfect sense. Why should humans inconvenience themselves to please the machine? If anyone’s at fault, it’s the database for not being smart enough to optimize the query on its own.

At my last job, we had architects pushing to make everything into microservices despite how absolutely horrible that idea is for performance and scalability (and understanding and maintainability and operations and ability for developers to actually run/test the code). The database can't do anything to help you when you split your queries onto different db instances on different VMs for no reason.

I heard we had a 7 figure annual compute spend, and IIRC we only had a few hundred requests per second peak plus some batch jobs for a few million accounts. A single $160 N100 minipc could probably handle the workload with better reliability than we had if we hadn't gone down that particular road to insanity.

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

#43

Post by mxuribe »

npsomaratna wrote: post #41
mxuribe wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hetzner is of course not U.S. based, but has expanded to have 2 U.S. sites (Oregon i think, and Virginia)....so that could be an option maybe. Caveat: i have not leveraged Hetzner in the U.s.....so can not speak to their quality.

That’s news thank you. I’ll check this out.

Uh, actually at a quick glance, seems the U.s. sites are more for their cloud offering and maybe not bare metal servers.....i think (sadly): https://www.hetzner.com/cloud

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

#44

Post by explain »

scastiel wrote: post #3
Dachande663 wrote: post #2

I 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.

Running the 800th most popular website in the world (25-50M pageviews per day) on a 1GB VPS (Spring Boot, MariaDB, Redis)

Very possible.

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

#45

Post by x0x0 »

Vegenoid wrote: post #24
diggan wrote: post #4

Do I read something wrong, or does the stats amount to ~400 daily visitors with ~2500 page views per day? That's about ~1.7 requests per minute... And they pay $115/month for this? I'm 99% sure I'm reading something wrong, as that's incredible expensive unless this is hosting LLM models or something similar, but it seems like it's a website for sharing expenses?

I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for any web app. A more charitable reading is that they pick the technologies that the jobs they want are hiring for, even if they don’t make sense for this simple application.

Or they're optimizing for not being a sysadmin, which some people can't do and even some of the people who can find to be very ungratifying work. For a project that runs on this person's enthusiasm, that seems not crazy.

It's certainly possible to spin up your own db backup scripts, monitor that, make sure it gets offsite to an s3 bucket or something, set yourself a calendar reminder to test that all once a month, etc... but if I had to write out a list of things that I enjoy doing and a list of things that I don't, that work would feature heavily on the "yeah, but no" list.

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

#46

Post by pentagrama »

I tested the app and found it awesome that it doesn't require account creation! You just get a private link, share it with the group, and when they open the link, it asks who they are to 'log in' as themselves. Of course, users could game the system by logging in as other members, but I think it's a compromise the developer made, knowing the user base and how frictionless it makes the user experience. Neat.

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

#47

Post by renewiltord »

carlosjobim wrote: post #22

Yet another testimony to how utterly few people are willing to pay for what they use in the abuse system called "open source". People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders behind! > A short disclaimer: I don’t need donations to make Spliit work. I am lucky enough to have a full-time job that pays me enough to live comfortably and I am happy to give some of the money I earn to the community. And thi…

Are you the guy with the https://osspledge.com/ billboards around San Francisco? Haha. They’re funny. I enjoyed the art. If it’s actually you, I’d be curious who the illustrator is or if you used generative AI.

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

#48

Post by avree »

scastiel wrote: post #3
Dachande663 wrote: post #2

I 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.

It’s surprising that you ask for advice on this topic in your blog, but then are very dismissive (complete with sarcastic wink) to the advice?

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

#49

Post by culi »

pentagrama wrote: post #46

I tested the app and found it awesome that it doesn't require account creation! You just get a private link, share it with the group, and when they open the link, it asks who they are to 'log in' as themselves. Of course, users could game the system by logging in as other members, but I think it's a compromise the developer made, knowing the user base and how frictionless it makes the user experience. Neat.

I've used this really neat website called when2meet[0] for community organizing heavily. You make an event, get a url and share it. Users choose their name and they can even add a completely optional password to prevent impersonation

I'm heavily inspired by it and working on an app for book clubs to host "elections" to choose their next book to read using a variety of voting systems (ranked choice, approval, scored, first past the post, etc).

[0] https://www.when2meet.com/

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

#50

Post by renewiltord »

This is cool, dude. Thank you for sharing. Irrespective of the actual numbers I’m always curious how people fund projects like this.

One thing I’ve been interested in is the idea of decentralized handling for this. That is, the project is funded in and every month if its bills don’t get paid it dies. If it receives enough to go over it buys T-bonds for the appropriate duration and then burns them down over time.

Perhaps in the past it would have to be automated but I wonder if in the near future a limited AI agent could be the server and you leave him alone to do his thing.

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