Founders with Successful Saas Apps - How much does your hosting cost?
Hey,
I'm looking to find out how much you guys spend on hosting overall or per user. Obviously this is broad as different applications store vast amounts of information for each user but some round figures and your hosting provider would be helpful.
Thank you!
At Less Annoying CRM, our AWS bill is about $5000/month for ~18k users (so $0.27/user/month). This isn't just for the direct hosting, but also things like keeping extensive backups, hosting smaller testing servers, etc. We also have some other infrastructure costs such as ~$500/month for Mailgun.
I do think that what you'll find is that the per user cost will be higher when you have fewer users. For example, even if you only have one user, you still probably can't get away with the cheapest servers. You need a minimum level of power, but most of it is going unused. So the bigger you get, the more you can smooth things out and actually utilize the resources you're paying for.
Also, reserved instances (if you use AWS) can save a lot of money, but those are harder to plan for when you're small because your future growth is uncertain. As you get bigger, you'll either (a) have a better sense of what resources you'll need in the future or (b) stop scaling by making the servers bigger and instead scale by adding more servers, which works really well with reserved instances.
This is very interesting. So hosting isn't something I should be worried about.
Would you tell us more info such as CPU/Ram and OS that you use on your server?
I'm not the infrastructure person, so take the following with a grain of salt. The sizes of our servers are constantly changing as we grow. I believe we're using a 2xl right now on AWS for our primary web server. That's probably overkill for what we need, but I think it's better to overspend on the server so we don't need to invest so many resources in optimizing it (put another way: the time it would take to do this "right" is worth more than the money it costs to just get a bigger server).
I'm pretty sure we use Ubuntu with PHP7/nginx, but don't quote me on that.
This is really helpful, thanks Tyler
No problem, I'm glad you found it helpful!
$6/month, hosting on Digital Ocean.
I've only got about 600 signed up users at the moment, but in load testing it stands up to 1,000 reqs/second, which would work out to around a million unique visitors per day, assuming traffic remains similarly spikey to how it is now. I'm running a resource efficient stack and I've tweaked some of the OS defaults, though.
Realistically, once it regularly clears $1k/month in revenue, I'm moving up to the $10 server 😃
Care to share details about your resource efficient stack? Language/Framework/OS/DB etc?
I’ve been thinking of downgrading ours because I think I’m over provisioned. 😂
It's Elixir with Phoenix Framework and Postgres running on Ubuntu.
Moving away from Node to Rails to Elixir was one of the best moves I've made and it motivated me to start a YT channel on it last year. In total, I've now made about a hundred tutorials on the Elixir language, and the vast majority of them are free.
damn it, your username should've given it away. :)
Haha, yes but I could see an alchemist maybe using Rust, too 😂
This is thé reason I built Startup Cost. A few hundred startups and side projects share their monthly running costs here. Some a few months old, others a few years.
Startup Costs is hosted on Digital Ocean for $10. 40k pageviews last week. :) See all the running costs: https://www.startupcosts.co/startup-costs
Ah brilliant! Great idea 😊
For the hosting of our application, not including any costs of the emails themselves, we're up at about $5k per month.
Worth bearing in mind we're an email marketing provider (EmailOctopus), so quite resource intensive in sending, storing and processing all the event data.
Hosted on AWS.
Roughly $2000/mo. $400 for Cloudflare, $1300 for AWS, $300 for Heroku. About 2500 users, approaching 1k paying customers.
AWS is roughly split 50/50 between Cloudfront and Aurora. Overall we spend about $1k/mo on bandwidth-related costs (Cloudfront/Cloudflare).
Approximately $1,000 per month on Google Cloud Platform. One service from my app is what takes most of this budget as the rest is principally serverless (Functions, Firestore, Storage).
I pay ~$150/mo - hosting on AWS
How many users have you got? :)
I pay about $150/month - hosting with Digital Ocean.
How many users have you got? :)
I think success of my project is better measured in terms of revenue rather than number of users. The project generates about $820-$850/month.
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
This comment was deleted 7 years ago