How do I calculate server expense for app?
I am planning on creating a mobile app, sort of like Instagram, with photo sharing being its main feature. But the app will be tailored to help local businesses market their product easier.
With that being said I am trying to figure out how much server/data fees will be due to photos using a lot of data. The app will also experience high traffic during lunch and dinner hours. Will this be affect pricing as well?
This is a tough question to answer and really boils down to how much you know about how your app/backend will perform given a number of variables like language its built in, database used, queries written, hardware hosted on, uploaded file sizes, etc. Knowledge of that is one of the things that comes with raw experience and having to figure it out on the fly.
Determining a ballpark cost for hosting/serving photos should be pretty easy, especially with a platform like AWS since they give you the price to store raw data (in S3) and the ingress/egress bandwidth costs. From there, it's up to you to plug in the rest of the numbers.
I don't know what your backend is built with/on, but Ive had good success using the AWS free tier for both EC2 and RDS (database) instances. You would probably be able to stay within the S3/Cloudfront free tier as well, and even if you cant, the pricing is super inexpensive (unless you plan on pushing terrabytes of data!). That should give you enough to get the ball rolling to then profile your app as real people start using it to get a feel for how it should scale.
Thanks for your response! I am planning on using the MERN stack plus MySql. Based on you mentioning that cost will be huge IF I need terabytes of data leads me to think that cost of hosting and server is way lower than I thought.
So would it be safe to say that if the social networking app were to have as much traffic as Instagram/Facebook. And 10% of the users paid $37 or $67 a month. There would still be great profit margins?
Apologies in advance if questions may be ignorant. I'm fairly new to the tech world and I am having a bit of an issue calculating the cost of maintaining the app, which will determine the price.
I'm used to selling product/services and calculating markup after.
Even then its not all that hue relatively speaking, especially if you're charging your users to use the platform. For example, using the aws pricing calculator, it'd cost about $24/mo to store 1TB of data. For photos at say 2MB a piece, thats 500k photos you could host. For 10TB of outbound data transfer to the internet per month, you're looking at about $921 (this is where it can get a little pricey).
No clue because this is going to depend on a multitude of factors. Facebook and Instagram have insane scale and operational overheads that using them as a benchmark is not the best idea.
What I would do is start by figuring out a few stages of growth that you think you can hit - i.e. 100 users, 1,000 users, 10k users, etc and try to estimate the cost per user at each stage and how long it will take you to reach each. This way you know what your cost is and gives you a starting point to determine what to charge. SaaS applications typically have an 80% profit margin, so you need to weigh your cost against what you think people might pay for your app/service. For a social-like app, my guess would be that your margin is going to be a lot lower unless you find a really high converting niche where this is valuable to them.
Asking questions is how you learn! My advice: keep asking them.
Yes. I had a rough calculation done on this for my app SnapMob.io . Hit me up if you want me yo share it.
Yes I would appreciate that! And most importantly I would love to hear any steps/thought process that you took to calculate this.
Ok here is the google doc that displays the logic. I simply asked an AWS pro to put something together. I have a table I use that generalizes the data and puts it into a calculation, but I am not comfortable just throwing that around. Please reach out to me via email and we can chat. The document at this link is the general description: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VA8w738Vj98TuupfZdtF1UlzVrQohudJ/view?usp=sharing