501–510 of 522 posts
Wonder how many of these people were still at the company: https://vimeo.com/173714 I just realized that video is old enough to vote.
Vimeo’s prices are insanely low for what they’re offering. You could not host on AWS and match them on price, nor probably even Hetzner. I never knew if they built out custom infrastructure or if they’ve just been losing money this whole time.
Vimeo’s prices are insanely low for what they’re offering. You could not host on AWS and match them on price, nor probably even Hetzner. I never knew if they built out custom infrastructure or if they’ve just been losing money this whole time.
Lots of custom infrastructure. A bit of losing money as well, but moderately profitable on the whole. They were a publicly traded company in their own right from 2021 to 2025, so you can look at the 10-Ks. There was a massive boost in business from COVID in 2020 and early 2021... which meant that the spinoff in May 2021 left investors in a position to be perpetually disappointed, sort of like Peloton.
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I'll grant that progress in coding hasn't been as impressive, although if you don't see a difference between Claude 3.7 Sonnet and 4.5 Opus (which is the actual SotA for Claude) I'd suspect a skill issue. I haven't seen miraculous progress in baseline code generation, but there has been a lot of progress in tool use. I can tell Claude CLI to install a complex package, for instance, and it will handle all the Python v…
> (which is the actual SotA for Claude) Cool, how much of it can I use with a $20/month subscription? I'd reach the monthly limit within hours while gaining nothing. It's not that I never tried it, it's that I did and the difference is nowhere near worth 10x my money (nor even the wait time needed to get results). > I'd suspect a skill issue. There's 0 skill involved with asking a magic 8 ball to solve your problem f…
right, yeah, I got started by being able to expense the $200 plan, and now I don't expense it but there's no going back, mostly because this is extremely undervalued and its unclear how long this deal will be around
Claude's $200/mo Max x20 plan is the best deal in the game, its equivalent to about $2600 worth of API credits, and is 4x more ability than the $100 plan (Max x5)
all roads to not really... caring... about why you're resistant to this. it's going to be too late when Anthropic raises the prices, all the reasons behind your reservations grow, unless someone else undercuts them just as well.
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Honestly, I wish more businesses would do this. It turns out that grandiose dreams make grandiose staffing, but a lot of great business ideas would thrive and bloom if the gardeners would just prune them back more often.
The part about "they get more expensive" makes me actively not want this, despite otherwise being someone obsessed with optimization. I'm not here to optimize billionaires' pockets at the expense of the people I actually make the product for.
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It sounds like they're trying to extract as much money as possible from a SaaS subscription service that's no longer actually paying any devs. From my perspective as a one-time (but no longer) paying user of evernote - WTF am I paying for monthly if not to support a dev team? Seriously - I get that there are infra costs for some of the services, and I wouldn't mind paying those costs plus a reasonable upcharge, but I…
Genuine question, why not use a free Git service or something I pay for Sourcehut now, but until recently I was using a free private GitHub account to sync my notes in Obsidian. It works fine and cost me nothing (at least nominally).
I went on a mission about 5 years ago to essentially stop paying for SaaS services if there was an opensource alternative available that I could self host.
I have old machines lying around anyways since I was upgrading about every 5 years for gaming. So I have a 5 node k8s cluster in my basement serving about 20 different services that I use, and I no longer pay for basically any subscription software.
Git is fine for text content, (hell, I have about 25 personal repos on github anyways, although speaking of... most are mirrored to a local gitea instance) but it's not a great solution for backing up DBs, binary data, media, photos, etc...
Eventually - I'll likely replace backblaze with a NAS at a family member's house, but for now - it's very cheap and the billing is fair (usage based billing, not the exorbitant monthly fees most SaaS services charge).
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Plus - I really like the flexibility of web based services. I don't have to remember to sync anything with bookstack, I just hit 'https://bookstack.[mydomain]' in a browser from any machine I want - Friends house? works. Public library? works. Wife's phone? works. Work laptop? works. etc... you get the idea.
Even after accounting for the initial outlay for a large NAS and my extra power consumption - I broke even in just under 3 years self hosting. Turns out SaaS is sorta a scam if you're technically capable.
And absolutely more power to ya for finding your own alternative solution!
I am surprised so many people don't understand the business model of Bending Spoons or are bewildered by it. In conventional infrastructure and product development you need engineering staff to build the product; once the product is built you need very little engineering. If you build a house you don't keep the builders on payroll once it's built to keep "building" it - you may need maintenance staff but that's it -…
That model works fine for a few years. Then you need a bigger change. Often, the system is built on top of some enterprise project, heavily customized, and you stay at your outdated version until it becomes unsupported. The maintainers don't care, and often don't have the capability to upgrade, so they just leave it as long as it keeps working. Or maybe some law has been introduced and requires a bigger change. Or the market just changes, and you need to support new APIs, new payment methods, new integrations...
The maintainers tend to quit every 1-2 years and are replaced with someone only trained by the previous generation. With every generation, the maintainers get worse. After 3 generations, all product knowledge is gone. To make things worse, the maintainers do stupid things in the code because they don't fully understand it, and it begins to rot. In the worst case I know, no one even knew what branch was deployed on production and what the last changes were.
Then, after 5-10 years of decay, some requirement comes along that would require a major refactoring. Everybody is overwhelmed, no one understands the internals, and eventually they decide that it the project is now so outdated that the only solution is to replace it. Management doesn't care because they can blame their predecessors.
In my experience, that's how it always works. I know at least 5 major projects that took over a year to develop, and costing millions, in at least one case tens of millions, that died like that.
Probably they will also fire remaining 15 people and move everything to Italy. Their strategy is to - fire everyone, - give product to very small but ambitious team of people - cut free version of the product to minimum even if does not make a sense to have a free version such as 5 video upload per month etc (they are doing this just to avoid backlash from users and community) - use every possible dark pattern exist…
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The economics are different because the industries are fundamentally different. Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. More features can always be added to software. If those new features create new product lines and attract new revenue, then the software engineers' salaries are more than paying for themselves. But, this obviously carries risk, that the new thing you develop won't be worth as mu…
> Software is never "finished" the way a building is finished. On the contrary, it absolutely can be, in both directions. Software can absolutely be "feature complete", and in the case of many products it would have been an improvement to say "we're done now" and switch from developing new features to maintenance-only mode, dealing only with API changes and new laws. Some examples of where it should be "done" by some…
Unfortunately when the software is done, the product lifetime comes to a close soon after. Everything around the product changes and the software needs to change to keep up. Smart lightbulbs need apps to keep working and you get kicked out of app stores if you don't keep up with never-ending churn Apple and Google imposes on you.
The only way to run older games is to use emulators and other 3rd party effort, that also needs to be continually updated. When you claim that any piece of software is done and completed, you've only externalized the effort required to keep it useful.
I absolutely agree with your pushback against feature creep. That is unfortunately a reflection of internal corporation value system, while the successful open source projects often know where to draw the line.