I miss those days Courtland used to share the cost of running IH
@csallen I believe many people would be interested to know how much you are currently paying to Google, AWS, Render, and other services you are using to power a community of close to 100k users
Is this something you can share?
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I moved off of AWS and onto Render. I think I pay something like $100/mo for Render for their biggest plan, which I certainly don't need. But it's so cheap that I signed up for it anyway, so I could get grandfathered in before they raised prices.
The big expense is Firebase, which costs me something like $400/month, but I'm sure I could massively reduce that or even cut it to near-$0 if I was rendering everything server-side and caching. Algolia is similar, but also would be easy to cut down on.
Thanks for showing us Render, I never heard of it. It looks interesting.
The big question though - is there any reason IH is not server-sided with caching then?
And if it is not a business secret or NDA protected, are the bills sorted by Stripe now?
Three years ago I thought it would be more fun to build a single-page app. Now it'd be too much work to transition away.
Yep!
Cool and cool!
How about email costs?
YES! @csallen Please share 🙏
Also interested @csallen
I don't think Courtland's ever been particularly focused on keeping costs down. And for someone living in SF, why should he? The costs of everything are so high there, that the costs of online indiehacking (and sometimes operating businesses) are a rounding error compared to rent and avocado toast.
totally wrong stuff I mistakenly believed:
@excid3's retelling of @levelsio's exploits on the Business Time podcast got me overly excited, but the idea was directionally correct 🤣
There are a lot of people running even leaner, too. With a compiled language and a reasonable tech stack, there's no reason why he couldn't cut costs to half or less what they are now.
But it's not worth his time to bother with that. Nomad List, etc are huge successes.
My costs as of this month:
=+
$3,584/mo
I could do with a much smaller Linode VPS, but I'd have to write much more performant code and spent more time in development. So it's a trade off.
I've tried to keep (paid) dependencies to a minimum, but stuff like Mapbox and Sendgrid are essential to my sites. Mapbox runs the maps on Nomad List and Hoodmaps and is amazing. I could host it myself but too much work.
Sendgrid I use for all email sending, but most use is for Remote OK. It has ~50,000 subscribers, and many of them get daily job alerts. So that's usually 700,000 emails per month, sometimes double! I considered DIY with Amazon SES but actually getting emails into someone's inbox and not their spam folder is difficult. Sendgrid helps with that.
Backups are essential to me too. I have 1 on-site (Linode) and 3 off-site backups.
Cloudflare helps with speeding up the sites and security.
I could do with less domains but I have to protect my brands somewhat, e.g. registering nomadlist.org, nomadlist.net, remoteok.co.uk, remoteok.co.
Server guy helps A LOT, now mostly with emergency fixes. I have lots of alerts set up, so that whenever anything goes down we both get an alert. When I'm sleeping or AFK he fixes it. Otherwise I can do it. He's on SLA retainer, so not a lot of work for him, but I feel more relaxed that my site stays up.
Also re: server admin, let's say you host on Heroku, you probably pay a lot more but you don't have to pay for server admin. Having a VPS for me means I get to about the same cost with paying a server admin.
My costs usually are 5%-10% of my revenue. Which I think is quite normal for software. You'll find most startups and companies biggest spending is on contractors/employees instead. Hiring one SF dev would be 25% of my revenue gone. Hiring four SF devs and I'd be losing money now.
So I think you can always go cheaper, but if your costs are only small % of your revenue then it might make more sense to focus on increasing revenue rather than cutting costs.
Thanks so much for the correction and up to date stats! This is super useful for people thinking, "what if my project blows up and gets traction?"
Sure!
$3,584/mo and I have about 1.5M pageviews/mo so that's $0.002 or 1/5 of a cent per pageview to give you an indication.
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I use SQLite so no costs
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If he ever has the number, it would be valuable to some of us just starting out.
Remember @levelsio has a server guy who he pays to do some magic whenever things are going wrong. Are you not going to add that to the server cost?
We are more interested in IH costs because Courtland is using modern tools which are easier for a single founder with limited or no DevOps experience. Can be way more expensive than running on bare metal such as Linode and DO.
You can't compare running on Linode or DO to running on AWS elasticbeanstalk or Firebase.
Nomadlist is running on Linode. IH is running on GCP, Render, and AWS. I am sure you know the difference
He sure didn't before. He was pretty much a poster child of a single founder getting it done with very little dev experience. Again though, after making something popular, contracting out help isn't hard. Highly recommend his IH podcast interview!
Say what you will about modernity, but DO has a higher growth rate (see Netcraft) and net movement between AWS is in their favor. Not sure if the same is true of Linode or not. But both DO and Linode offer a subset of the same kinds of services AWS does with a simpler UX and is generally more popular with indies.
Render, I'd compare more with Heroku (easier but considerably more expensive).
Maybe it's now paid by Stripe, so it's less an issue for him and he can focus on developing the website?
That's not the point.
The point is that we are interested in knowing how much is being paid. Not who is paying.
I'd also be interested to know how IH makes money.
It doesn't. Stripe (which is a $35B fintech company) owns IH and subsidizes it.
Ah, that explains it
You can still ask to find out possible revenue engine if he were to monetize.
Last time someone asked, he said he would be selling 2 slots of the podcast ads for $24k USD each. That's $48k USD for every episode of podcast released. And he releases more than 1 podcasts every month.
Another way could be featured products, featured posts, etc
Very true, especially with a tech audience.
$48k is probably the MRR from podcasting. I am not 100% confident but close to. As Courtland said the mean podcast makes 40k downloads. He makes 9/10 per month you have 400k download per month.
Confront with this interview https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/114-jeff-meyerson-of-software-engineering-daily
$60k for 20k daily downloads.
$24k for 40k impressions would be insane.