Our weekend project 5 months later: 10+ million users
I briefly posted about our COVID-19 app on IH when we launched it in January: https://coronavirus.app [EDIT: if the link seems dead to you, check the comment section below]. Five months later, I thought I'd give you guys an update. And what I can say is that our weekend project.... has far exceeded all our expectations:
- 10+ million users
- 2,500+ supporters on Buy Me A Coffee:
- #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt:
- 350,000+ backlinks
- Tons of press coverage including Business Insider, Forbes, ABC News
While we still continue maintaining the app for our 100K+ DAU, we've also started working on what's next: https://progressier.com
A SaaS product that makes it easy for developers and non-technical website owners to turn their websites into a PWA.
Progressier was actually inspired by a tweet of one of the engineers of Google Chrome.
When I started writing code for our coronavirus app, never did I imagine this would have such an impact 😮 Humbled and surprised it turned out the way it did.
Can you share any general figures of the donations from Buy Me A Coffee? I've been curious about attempting to support a current project with donations.
I scraped the buymeacoffee page and looks like people bought around 5238 coffees, so approx. $26190.
Cool! Thanks.
What technology did you use to create the dashboards?
A great success story @kbasset. Congratulations and a great way to implement your skill set for such a worthy initiative.
I donated a while back and have been using your app for months. Great work and congrats!
Congrats 🎉
Very impressive, well done!
Congratulation , such a great work and timing. You deserved it
Congratulations, this is really inspiring! How much does the infrastructure cost to handle that kind of load and what are you running on?
It could probably be hosted for free as a static site.
Everything is running on top of Firebase/GCP. We're using Cloud Functions for our API, Firestore to store all the data and Cloud Scheduler to regularly scrape gov sites to retrieve data. Since the launch, overall cost of all of this has been about $9,500.
@XCS: Given the traffic and the nature of the data, I highly doubt there would be any way to host that app for free anywhere. But I could be wrong, so let me know how you would have gone about this!
hey dude, maybe you can try this for reduce your static hosting:
I could be wrong, please correct me..
As for the scraping and data storage, I think a basic $5/vps could work, as the amount of data processed doesn't seem to be that big. I might be wrong as I don't know what scraping covid data actuslly involves.
Not sure about the scraping part, but for the hosting I would have shared a PWA that has all numbers stored on the client-side. So I would have stored it on a cheap server and then add Cloudflare on top to handle the heavy traffic. Whenever data was updated, let's say twice per day, the Cloudflare cache should be cleared.
So the site would just be a cached self-standing app distributed through Cloudflare CDN that.
I remember this when you first published it and it has been my go to place for checking the latest coronavirus stats. 💪
Thanks for that!
@kbasset - Interesting stuff. Never heard of a PWA before now, but definitely something I'd like to follow.
I tried to pull up your Corona site on my mobile phone, via Chrome, to test the install process of a PWA.
Got an error:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oklbohnnuinu226/crnvr-app-error.jpg?dl=0
It that expected?
Yeah, I can reproduce this. I think it has to do with the fact that you're using the alternative domain (https://crnvr.us) instead of the main domain (https://coronavirus.app). Making Progressier work on websites that can be accessed via two different domains is an edge case we're not handling yet. That's a pretty rare exception I think since 99.99% of websites only have one domain. If you can try on the main domain, you should be able to test the install process. If the main domain doesn't work for you, trying on a different network typically solves the problem.
Ah, gotcha. Yeah, when I first tried accessing the main domain, I wasn't able to on both my home & work wifi.
Turned off wifi, and used mobile network and was able to do the install -- pretty slick.
Will say that one thing confused me briefly -- the prompt says Add to Home screen, but after I installed, it wasn't on any of my Home Screens.
It just listed in my app list, as the last one.
Regardless, pretty cool.
And I like how you used that app as lead-gen, exposure opportunity for Progressier. Good marketing move.
Great work Kevin ! Had you been able to monetize the site, other than the Buy Me A Coffee feature?
We're also selling access to our API to developers: https://coronavirus.app/api
I don't really have any other plans to monetize it besides that and the coffee feature.
Kevin, this is remarkable. Nice work. How do I view the app though? This link is showing dead to me: https://coronavirus.app/
Argh, yeah, we've had some issues with ISPs blocking access to the domain (presumably because the URL contains the terms "virus"). Try https://crnvr.us. Exactly the same app and content, but this alternative domain shouldn't suffer from the same limitations.
that worked. looks great. way to move quick, get MVP up, scale fast. not easy!