[HN Gopher] 2M users but no money in the bank
___________________________________________________________________
2M users but no money in the bank
Author : leandot
Score : 374 points
Date : 2024-09-06 07:16 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (exercism.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (exercism.org)
| echelon wrote:
| Why is this free? That's the problem here. They'll easily get
| 10-100x their donation amount if they make this freemium. They
| don't even have to degrade the core experience.
|
| Life takes energy. You need to make some of it back to survive.
| Asking for money isn't a dirty thing.
| OccamsMirror wrote:
| it's that any profit made must be reinvested into the
| organization to further its mission, rather than being
| distributed to shareholders or owners. Non-profit organizations
| can and often do generate revenue that exceeds their expenses,
| in other words... profit. The key distinction is how that
| surplus is used. In a non-profit:
|
| - Profits are reinvested to support the organization's goals
| and activities. - There are no owners or shareholders who
| receive dividend payments. - Any surplus funds are typically
| used to expand services, improve operations, or build financial
| reserves for future needs.
|
| Non-profits still need to be financially secure.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| $7500/mo in donations is also already really, really good. It
| seems like they could easily turn this into a viable business
| with some small changes.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's free because all the competition is free and switching
| costs are zero. They claim that trying to upsell people causes
| them to quit.
| Fokamul wrote:
| Also internet is flooded with similar learning websites. First
| time I've heard about exercism though. Looks cool.
| ainiriand wrote:
| Completed the whole c++ and PHP paths there. It is by no means
| a way to learn those languages in my opinion.
| h1fra wrote:
| Kudos for being passionate and providing stuff for free.
|
| A lot of people will probably tell you to add a paywall, not sure
| it's breaking the "non-profit business model" if you keep the
| price really low. But at the same time, even a low price would
| deter some users (myself included) and it would also devalue your
| content :/
| ihid wrote:
| Thanks :)
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Should offer some paid structured courses for $200, and offer a
| 90% discount for existing users.
|
| Without revenue any company will fail regardless of popularity. A
| firm may acquire the company for the customer/lead list, but I
| wouldn't count on that kind of valuation matching the work your
| team put into the projects. =3
| mef wrote:
| out of money, final payroll, no alternative but to go into zombie
| mode, yet for the last few months the co-founder has been working
| on his next product which will launch in 2025.
|
| maybe everything that could have been tried was tried but this
| comes off like some of the effort spent working on the next
| company could have been spent keeping this one alive
| vidyesh wrote:
| They said they will be using the proceeds from that for-profile
| company to pay for a team member's salary and keep Exercism
| running as much as they can. So this next company could be
| considered to be an effort to keep this old one alive!
| p3rls wrote:
| It sucks being out of money and then you have to fend off the
| "why aren't you more dedicated" line of questioning when you
| had to find an alternative to keep the company alive
| yieldcrv wrote:
| Oooh contingent on the next unproven idea being economically
| viable.
|
| Amusing. I walk away from all business partners that think
| this way
|
| They hand waive away "who will pay what"
| dheera wrote:
| > but this comes off like ...
|
| You don't know more about the company than them.
|
| Most likely they saw this coming months ahead of time, and
| needed to figure out how to pay their own rents after actual
| doomsday and needed to pre-emptively start figuring out what's
| next.
|
| Founders who don't start with a pre-existing financial cushion
| have very, very little job security if they underpay themselves
| and their businesses shut down without an exit. Also, founders
| tend to be generalists, and most big companies don't need more
| generalists, so it's not easy to get hired, doubly so if you
| have wasted a lot of your brain pitching to investors and
| having coffee chats with clients. The harsh reality is, the
| more you are forced to chat with investors and customers
| instead of working heads-down, the more you lose your hard
| technical abilities that _other_ people would hire you for.
|
| As a founder of a shutting down company, if you want to pay
| your rent on time, you need to do one of 3 things: (a) pay
| higher salaries prior to shutdown to give you some time to
| figure yourself out (controversial), (b) start studying to be a
| specialist well ahead of shutdown and get on the interview
| treadmill, (c) start working on your next thing well ahead of
| shutdown.
|
| If you do none of those things, things can get really dangerous
| to your personal finances.
| Laaas wrote:
| How are they managing to spend 7.5k a month in server expenses?
| Are they using AWS?
| re-thc wrote:
| > Are they using AWS?
|
| Yes!
| Laaas wrote:
| You'd think they'd use a cheaper hosting service if that's
| literally the only thing preventing them from having positive
| gross profit.
| fendy3002 wrote:
| honest questions, is there any ECS-like hosting that's much
| cheaper?
| re-thc wrote:
| > is there any ECS-like hosting that's much cheaper?
|
| Most have adopted EKS-like services i.e. kubernetes.
|
| There is fly.io that's closer. Hope they improve on the
| reliability aspect.
| jfdjkfdhjds wrote:
| for compute of containerized payloads, in house servers
| is a no brainer for cost.
|
| almos zero sysadmin troubles. might even reduce the
| troubles of working with eks/ecs.
|
| now for storage and db, that's a different story.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| $50/month gets you a 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic
| on a 1Gbps link on Ionos.
|
| https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps
|
| $7500/month would get them 150 such servers.
|
| Maybe they should cut the AWS costs and hire their developer
| back.
|
| Id be really interested to hear the breakdown of their AWS
| bill. It would be a crime if they were blowing what money
| they have giving Amazon 9 cents per gigabyte egress.
| dspillett wrote:
| If they are self-managing all the extras you get with a
| decent cloud setup (backups, node failover, load
| distribution and auto-scaling, multi-region or at least
| multi-DC for availability beyond single node failures,
| ...), they are going to need an infrastructure person as
| well as that developer. Preferably two so the one isn't
| effectively on-call 24/7. And for that multi-DC for
| availability thing: you might need someone (or assign time
| from existing people) to manage the accounts with your
| various providers, you won't want tens+ of VPSs from just
| one provider like that. Of and on backups & failover, you
| need person-time (and other resources, but the people are
| probably the expensive part from the business PoV) to
| regularly test and adjust all of that, so you can be
| reasonably sure it all works when actually needed. And you
| need to manage replacing those people when/if they decide
| to move on to something new, etc...
|
| Also note that a lot of the things you are paying for (CPU
| cores, traffic, network throughput) in those nodes are
| shared resources (that Gbit link especially) and/or have
| "fair use" policies attached to them, and while the same
| might be true of cloud providers those policies are often
| either more generous or (perhaps more important from the
| business stability PoV) at least better defined.
|
| "Cloud" _is_ still expensive compared to buying and
| managing individual nodes, even if you add in all the above
| and the things I no doubt forgot to mention, but it does
| give a _lot_ more than the same cost in individual nodes
| than this sort of comparison suggests. And sometimes just
| not having to deal with all that, keeping the business more
| focused on its core competencies, is worth the extra
| expense.
|
| In DayJob we use Azure a lot, and sometimes I see the costs
| of certain things12 and balk, and we do still have
| infrastructure people to manage the platform, but overall
| it works better for us than managing our own resources more
| directly. We have an extra complication due to our client
| base (regulated companies like banks and insurers, who are
| storing PII of both their own people and their customers
| with us) in that we have to give a lot of assurances on
| security and such which would be more work (it is already a
| _lot_ of work as anyone else in that sort of B2B arena can
| attest) if we self-managed everything.
|
| ----
|
| [1] $2,400/yr for SFTP access to a storage account if you
| need it available 24/7?! Especially given we have at least
| one such account per client as their requirements
| understandably require that level of separation. I think
| we'll keep using the relay & management dashboard I setup
| in a few cheap VMs, thanks...
|
| [2] and the performance given the costs: AzureSQL3 I'm
| looking at you!
|
| [3] though again, some of that cost is in things like the
| scaling flexibility and other infrastructure convenience,
| which the business finds worth paying for
| re-thc wrote:
| > If they are self-managing all the extras you get with a
| decent cloud setup (node failover, load distribution and
| auto-scaling, multi-region or at least multi-DC for
| availability beyond single node failures, ...)
|
| History has proven that most of the time these reduce
| availability than increase them. Any sort of failover and
| the complicated setups to get it going introduces bugs
| and issues more than the redundancy it provides.
|
| Have we forgotten the number of large single server
| applications running on single linux machines that never
| needed an unplanned restart or had a crash for years? And
| you can't beat AWS us-east-1 or Azure or GCP in outages
| lately.
|
| And I doubt any service like this needs auto-scaling.
| Most services barely will use up a proper single server
| i.e. something with >96 cores >1TB of RAM.
|
| > "Cloud" is still expensive compared to buying and
| managing individual nodes > And sometimes just not having
| to deal with all that, keeping the business more focused
| on its core competencies, is worth the extra expense.
|
| There are ways to not manage all that and still be in the
| cloud. It's called don't use AWS or Azure.
| nh2 wrote:
| > they are going to need an infrastructure person
|
| No.
|
| I run multi-site Ceph+Nomad clusters with NixOS on
| Hetzner for our startup and maintaining those takes less
| than 5% of my time.
|
| By using great tools and understanding them well you can
| do it with little manpower. I learned all those tools in
| around 3 months total -- so around as much as getting a
| basic understanding of AWS IAM ;-)
|
| The only thing you don't get with that from your list is
| auto-scaling. But the with Hetzner the price difference
| vs AWS is 10x for storage, 20x for compute, and 10000x
| for traffic, so we just over-provision a little. And my
| 5% time /includes/ manual upscaling.
|
| Yes, I am oncall 24/7 to manage that infra, but I'd be as
| well when using hosted cloud services. Yes, fixing a Ceph
| issue, or handling Hashicorp Consul not handling an out-
| of-disk situation correctly is more complicated than
| waiting for S3 go come back from its outage, but the
| savings are massive. Testing whether your backup restore
| works is something you need to do equally with hosted
| services.
|
| So it is definitely possible to self-manage everything,
| for 5% of one engineer.
| dspillett wrote:
| _> By using great tools and understanding them well you
| can do it with little manpower._
|
| "and understanding them well" is doing a lot of legwork
| there. From a standing start how does a startup that has
| the skills & experience to make the product but not
| necessarily manage the infrastructure get to the point of
| understanding the tools well, or even knowing which tools
| are best to learn to the point of understanding well?
|
| _> So it is definitely possible to self-manage
| everything, for 5% of one engineer._
|
| I can accept that as true, if you have the right
| person/people, and they are willing (particularly the on-
| call part).
| tptacek wrote:
| $7500/mo is less than half of one headcount --- if you
| could get all hosting _for free_. This is a sideshow. With
| these numbers, their viability is not determined by hosting
| costs.
|
| The problem here is that we all have opinions about
| hosting, but not so many useful opinions about business
| models, so hosting feedback is what this person is going to
| get.
| Lionga wrote:
| $7500/mo easily hires two great 10 yr experience
| developers in most parts of the world.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Maybe I'm out of touch with how things have changed over
| the last year or 2, but 2 years ago you'd struggle to
| find 1 _great_ dev with 10 YoE for that price ($90K /yr)
|
| Even if things have changed now, I can't imagine you'd
| find a _great_ dev with 10 YoE for less than $80K /yr,
| and that's hiring globally (with the time zone issues
| that come with it). You can probably get 1 OK dev and 1
| bad dev with 10 YoE for that price though, but you'd
| usually be better off just hiring one great dev than any
| other combination.
| tptacek wrote:
| It's not $90k/yr, it's something substantially less,
| because the fully loaded cost of an employee is much
| higher than their nominal salary.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I'm assuming you mean _more_?
| tptacek wrote:
| I just meant, you'd be paying these supposed engineers
| less than $90,000/yr.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Oh you're right, the salary the employee would be getting
| in this hypothetical would be less than the fully loaded
| cost.
|
| So the person claiming you can get 2 "great" devs with 10
| YoE for 90K/yr is effectively saying there are 2 "great"
| devs with 10 YoE somewhere in the world who are willing
| to work for like $35K/yr (or something in that realm less
| than 45K/yr).
|
| I don't think the market has gotten _that_ bad, but
| again, I 'm not really paying attention to the job market
| right now.
| tptacek wrote:
| Right, I would just bring this back to, the fact that
| we're even entertaining this discussion illustrates how
| these hosting costs have basically nothing to do with
| this person's economic problem. With 2MM active users, if
| $90k/yr is breaking the bank, you haven't figured it out
| yet.
|
| That's not to say it can't be figured out! But people
| telling them that they should reduce hosting costs are
| doing a disservice.
| Lionga wrote:
| You are out of touch with most parts of the world.
| Average income worldwide is about $10K a year. So 90K it
| about 9 times average income and in many parts of the
| world hires the top 10% of developers of that country.
|
| But It will probably hire less then half of a US
| developer that then pisses all the other money away on
| overpriced AWS Servers, so that is right.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| Average income is heavily skewed by unskilled workers who
| constitute the overwhelming majority of the workforce, as
| well as workers with less than a high school degree which
| constitute the overwhelming majority of the workforce.
|
| I actually agree with you that 90K gets you top-10% of
| the developers in many countries, but you were saying
| that 45K would get you a great developer with 10 YoE.
|
| Devs with 10 YoE are already probably less than 20% of
| developers, and there are devs with 10 YoE who aren't
| "great" developers. Perhaps this is my own western near-
| sightedness talking, but I'm under the impression that
| _great_ developers may constitute fewer than 5% of
| developers in some of these countries in question (I
| assume due to a combination lower English proficiency
| which is important for working with Western employers,
| different cultural norms which cause many developers from
| some countries to adopt anti-patterns for working
| effectively with teams, and more limited access to
| reliable internet and better equipment, which could
| result in lengthened feedback loops during their learning
| process).
|
| But my primary argument wasn't that you'd be unable to
| get a great dev with 10YoE, it was that you'd be unable
| to get _two_ great devs with 10 YoE for 90K /yr, or 45K
| each, or as tpacek pointed out, more like 35K/yr take-
| home.
| tptacek wrote:
| I don't think this has much to do with what I said, and
| is rather a grievance comment about how much cheaper
| programmers are abroad from the US. But, if you really
| believe this, you should be outcompeting a lot of US tech
| companies with this strat.
| j-a-a-p wrote:
| That is easy to turn around, if the company would do smarter
| and cheaper hosting we would ask why they didn't spend more
| time into finding a viable business model.
| michaelt wrote:
| It sounds like a lot, but even if they dropped server expenses
| to zero they'd only have $90k/year to spend.
|
| That is not much, considering they need to cover all aspects of
| running a nonprofit; they need enough technical staff to
| maintain a 24/7 on call rota while letting people occasionally
| go on holiday; and they need to pay healthcare and pensions and
| suchlike on top of salaries.
|
| And it's not like they can offer a meagre salary now but
| promise vast wealth in the future, like a startup might.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| That's only around $10/hour, which doesn't actually buy one a
| whole lot of servers/databases/bandwidth/monitoring/logs/etc.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >> which doesn't actually buy one a whole lot of
| servers/databases/bandwidth/monitoring/logs/etc.
|
| It buys you 150 machines for a month 12 core 24GB VPS with
| unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link
|
| See my comment below.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| And then you get to stand up your own databases, load
| balancers, monitoring, logging, etc. For which you need a
| development team with significant operations experience to
| do correctly - who will surely cost you more than $90k/year
|
| I get it, AWS looks expensive, but a bunch of their
| foundational services are real force-multipliers if you
| don't have the cash to build out entire operational teams.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| >> if you don't have the cash to build out entire
| operational teams
|
| Its just not true that AWS doesn't need expensive experts
| to get stuff done - it really does.
|
| Anyone who is half decent on the command line in Linux
| can get all those servers installed and running without
| the spaghetti complexity of AWS.
|
| The cloud as a magical place of simplicity and ease of
| use and infinite scalability in every direction - I think
| its the opposite of that - AWS is a nightmarish tangle of
| complexity and hard to configure, understand, relate and
| maintain systems.
|
| Its MUCH easier just to load up a single powerful machine
| with everything you need. I'm not saying that works for
| all workloads but a single machine or a few machines can
| take you an awful long way.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Its MUCH easier just to load up a single powerful
| machine with everything you need. I'm not saying that
| works for all workloads but a single machine or a few
| machines can take you an awful long way.
|
| For the core service I tend to favour monoliths too, but
| I would say you are vastly underestimating the halo of
| other crap needed to operationalise a real website/SaaS.
|
| Where is your load balancer? Your database redundancy?
| Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your
| logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling
| metrics/alarming?
|
| Bare metal is great, but you have to build a ton of shit
| to actually ship product.
| fragmede wrote:
| > Where is your load balancer? Your database redundancy?
| Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your
| logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling
| metrics/alarming?
|
| What we lose sight of, is that those things aren't as
| important as we, as SREs would like to think. When you're
| a corporation of one person, trying to stay afloat, you
| can just rely on a single big box and spend your time
| dealing with all the other problems first. Make sure you
| have an escape hatch so you can scale up if need be, but
| don't overengineer for a problem you won't run in to.
| timc3 wrote:
| Have managed all that in the past with bare metal and
| more (you forgot configuring routers, installing OS,
| managing upgrades, dealing with hardware swaps, etc). Its
| soooo much more sane to deal with that than AWS
| configuration, actually relatively easy for someone half
| competent. Luckily we can just employ people to mess
| around full time with AWS.
| re-thc wrote:
| > And then you get to stand up your own databases, load
| balancers, monitoring, logging, etc.
|
| You get all if not most of this on DigitalOcean, Linode,
| Upcloud, Scaleway, etc all of a LOT cheaper.
|
| > but a bunch of their foundational services are real
| force-multipliers if you don't have the cash to build out
| entire operational teams.
|
| No, it's not. As above and for a lot of things AWS'
| complexity and silly factor can make it even worse. In
| GCP I can setup a dual region bucket. As simple as that.
| In AWS I need to setup 2 buckets, a replication role,
| bucket policies, lifecycle policies and a lot more just
| to get the same. Force multiplier? As in make it slower?
| EKS takes longer than the default Terraform timeout to
| provision. The list goes on...
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I think a lot of folks make their lives unnecessarily
| complicated by trying to do things on AWS in an
| explicilty non-AWS way (I inherited a startup codebase
| last year that did this to themselves in spades).
|
| Why go to the trouble of running Kubernetes on top of
| AWS, when ECS does roughly the same job at a fraction of
| the complexity?
|
| Why use Terraform when CloudFormation maps better to the
| underlying primitives?
| Atotalnoob wrote:
| Less vendor lockin.
|
| My devex team has developed helm charts we can use that
| automatically detect EKS, AKS or gcp K8s and configure
| the parts of an app to work with each environment, but
| the end users of the helm chart don't really have to
| care.
| timc3 wrote:
| Vendor lockin. Knowledge transfer.
|
| And I disagree that AWS is less complex. Managing
| services across AWS is complex, K8s is as well but I
| would rather manage K8S on bare instances.
| ihid wrote:
| We're paying ~$1k/month for all our webservers (which is a
| dozen ECS instances). They're handling about 3,000 requests per
| second (but that does sometimes massively spike to tens of
| thousands if not more).
|
| We're paying ~$1k/month for all our tooling servers (so the 150
| different test runners, representers, analyzers that are used
| to check peoples code. There's >=1 of those running every
| second). Bare in mind, we're running student's code in over 70
| languages here. Each is a docker container (often many gb
| large) - so we pay for HDD too.
|
| The biggest actual cost is the database at $2k/month. We have
| about 600 queries per second, and around 10MB per second
| (spiking to 47MB per second) of read throughput. It's an
| autoscaling database, but AWS determines that it's at the level
| it needs to be, and if I turn that down, performance suffers
| (I've tried).
|
| Beyond that, all the other individual services are ~$300/m, so
| quite small amounts, but for things we rely on (e.g. caching
| servers, a shared filesystem amongst all those servers, and
| other things).
|
| $1.2k on tax is also fun.
| ahofmann wrote:
| Thank you so much for sharing your costs! I was very curious
| to see what the real expenses for AWS services look like, as
| I've always assumed AWS is massively overpriced.
|
| From the numbers you've provided, it seems like your total
| cost is around $5.5k, so I assume the remaining $2k is
| attributed to traffic.
|
| Everything looks quite reasonable, except for the database
| and traffic costs. I've run MySQL servers handling 150k
| reads/sec and 50k updates/sec with no issues, even on very
| cheap machines (around EUR30 per month). Years ago, we were
| serving over 100 million pages (of heavy content) per month,
| and we didn't even bother looking at traffic statistics
| because, here in Germany, it's hard to hit the traffic limits
| that most hosting providers impose.
|
| That being said, AWS is less expensive than I initially
| thought. At the same time, I'm confident you could reduce
| your hosting bill by up to $2k without even leaving AWS by
| setting up your own database server. Moving away from AWS
| entirely might be challenging, as managing a fleet of about
| 30 servers would likely take one or two days of work per week
| (I'm managing a dozen mostly idling servers and I work one
| day per month on them). When your hosting bill reaches $30k,
| I'm very sure it would be cheaper to hire someone (hint, hint
| ;-)), that moves everything to dedicated servers and manages
| them.
| RobRivera wrote:
| A part of me is tempted to say 'maybe some cost reduction in
| cloud bill is possible' but for the scale you operate at and
| cost you already have, I feel like refactoring the revenue
| model is the greater strategic 'bang for your buck'
| AndroTux wrote:
| Not to be that guy, but I'm pretty sure that these volumes
| (talking about ECS and database here) could be handled quite
| well by a few dedicated $100/mo servers, provided the code
| isn't hugely unoptimized. So I'm sure you could save (very
| conservatively) half your budget when going on-prem. That
| said, it probably won't help you much overall, I would
| imagine.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't want to armchair ops your decisions, but maybe do
| consider moving to some dedicated Hetzner servers, at least
| for the runners. You can probably reduce that cost tenfold
| relatively simply.
| whatevaa wrote:
| AWS will charge for network traffic, both in and out. Would
| need to calculate what is cheaper.
| stavros wrote:
| The runners take some code and return text, right? That
| shouldn't be too much traffic, hopefully.
| Lionga wrote:
| Move everything to Hetzner (or the like) at double the
| capacity that AWS has on average and you still spend about
| 10% of what you spend on AWS.
|
| That is how stupid costly AWS is and 99% of people using
| AWS are wasting money like there is now tomorrow.
| deisteve wrote:
| Problem is Hetzner has such stringent user verification
| its tough to get hosting on there.
|
| You don't even need to use Hetzner, I'm actually quite
| surprised they are spending 2k on DB. For the env
| isolation i understand they need ec2 but...
|
| it shouldn't cost anywhere that amount, for instance I
| have 3 million users on a $40/month digital ocean VPS
| with just Django + Postgres and I have far more reads and
| writes.
|
| for env isolation you could spin up a $5/month VPS and
| shut it down when idle
| Lionga wrote:
| Sure Hetzner ist just one example. Many provides sell at
| about 5 to 10% of AWS prices.
| genewitch wrote:
| I've mentioned this before on HN, but we had a single
| postgres machine primary read/write server that did 4k QPS
| 24/7. It had DDR ram as storage on a PCIe card, of course,
| but this was before "SSD" was a thing. It was for a site that
| hosted portfolios of images, for both people in the images
| and people who took the images, and such. The front end data
| (the images and text) was, iirc, 3TB. Sometimes we'd need a
| server in a new location, so a locked metal briefcase was
| carried from the DC where the front-end data lived, to our
| offices, where one of our "IT" people would then carry it on
| to the new location and offload it to those servers in that
| location.
|
| Anyhow that database server was probably ~$35,000 all in.
| That's 5 months of your current AWS spend. One of the things
| i did during that time was take a 2 generation newer server,
| a $35,000 1u Dell with 512GB of ram, and mirrored the
| postgres database into tmpfs and enabled replication, then we
| set that machine as primary. The new machine didn't break a
| sweat. So much so that one of the things me and the (really
| very awesome and nice; Hi, Chuck, if you're out there!) DBA
| did was set postgres to use no more than 640KB of memory,
| then _ran the entire site_ , with 4k QPS, on that postgres
| instance with 640KB of memory (not counting the 280GB of
| tmpfs storage, of course!), just to prove it would work. It
| did - although some of the bookeeping queries (not sure what
| they're called) were taking a very long time, and would have
| had to be refactored to use less temporary memory, and such.
|
| anyhow my point is, there are people out there that can do
| things cheaper, or faster, or more efficiently than whatever
| you got goin on right now. Your statistics on "per second"
| usage and the like don't sound too demanding. If you could
| squirrel away $500/month for a few months, and you ask around
| for someone that can rack metal and has peering, there are
| people (including me) who could get you co-lo in <16U[0] with
| redundancy, where your only monthly infra charges would be
| the co-lo fees.
|
| [0] Old, extremely beefy, but large servers are generally 4U,
| but _dirt cheap_ for what you get. Ex: 80 thread, 512GB RAM,
| 8 SAS bay HP server, $800 _shipped_. And i bought those 6
| years ago. However: 5950x, 128GB RAM, 24 SATA port can be had
| for <$2000 (i'm guessing based on what i paid a few years
| ago), and that's roughly equivalent in power (kernel compile
| takes 3 seconds longer on the 5950x but it uses 1/4th the
| power at the wall). The reason i tagged on <16U is because at
| most you're gunna need 4x4U, two "front end" and two "back
| end" machines, with duties split and everything redundant in
| the rack. I haven't looked in a while to see what's available
| on ebay as far as more density, but for sure 16U or less!
|
| The issue becomes: how do you find someone who knows how to
| do all that, that is willing to work for next to nothing
| because they believe in the ngo/nfp? Maybe there's a tech
| forum that people like that read, who knows.
|
| good luck, and thank you for doing things to help other
| people. I hope it all works out in the end.
|
| email in profile.
| whatevaa wrote:
| RAM as storage for DB? So data loss on reboot? Sounds like
| very specific use case.
| genewitch wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion-io
|
| maybe i misspoke - at one point there was battery backed
| DDR ram they used in PCIe, but by the time i came around
| they were using Fusion IO PCIe devices, which i guess
| were NAND flash, not DDR. or, alternatively, that is how
| it was explained during onboarding - "it's like DDR on a
| PCIe card, so the iops are 1000x that of SAS 10k drives"
|
| unless you're talking about our experiment of tmpfs -
| then yeah, the use case was "genewitch heard bill gates
| say 640k should be enough for anyone; here's a super
| beefy machine to test that theory; theory tested." We
| didn't run the site live on that machine for more than 10
| minutes or so, we switched it back to the fusion-io
| backed server immediately. It was a proof of concept
| about _one_ of the things we could do with these new
| servers - read replicas with the DB in tmpfs for extreme
| speed and no IO blocking.
| PuffinBlue wrote:
| I was curious, so I just checked on one of our customers (I
| work at a small MSP in the UK) by way of comparison and we
| have on chugging along happily at more than double those
| numbers on a $288 Linode dedicated CPU instance. And we're
| only on that size for ease of disk space handling as the
| database is several hundred GB. CPU is basically at zero,
| it's the disk IO that actually gets you on some of these
| busier databases (from my experience).
|
| RDS is _extremely_ expensive. All managed databases are.
|
| That said, it's a trade off of convenience and being in the
| AWS bubble, and weighing up the pros/cons of separating out
| services. Data Transfer is another thing to consider too of
| course. Sticking your database elsewhere might cost more in
| egress traffic communicating with it from your other AWS
| infrastructure. If you're all in on other AWS services,
| sometimes the RDS price is just worth it when it comes to the
| total price. Sound like this might be the case for your
| setup.
|
| I hope you do manage to work things out. The service you have
| is great.
|
| PS - Side note on RDS sizing. You might already know but
| sometimes it's worth increasing the storage size on gp3 type
| storage above 400GB (if you haven't already) as you get
| 12,000 IOPS baseline against 500MiB/s throughput[0] when you
| have that much storage. That's 4 times the below 400GB
| baseline performance but you only pay for the additional
| storage cost. It can make a difference if you're IOPS
| constrained or trying to deal with bursty traffic but want to
| use the smallest instance size possible otherwise to save
| costs.
|
| [0]https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/CHA
| P_...
| tr33house wrote:
| First time I've heard about them. I hope this helps them get a
| bigger donation pool and support from similarly minded
| organizations
| bux93 wrote:
| What does "I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model" mean?
| Non-profits have costs they pay. Many famously outlive their
| founders. Many, like co-ops or credit unions, don't depend on
| donations/endowments. They have revenue greater than expenses as
| a matter of basic accounting?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Non-profit is OK. Non-revenue is a bit of a non-starter.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Yeah, that was a big weird red flag for me as well. He is
| blaming the failure of his dream on "the non-profit model"?
| Wait till he tries the for-profit model...
|
| Then he goes on to say that he is upset that 96% of people stop
| the program. Dude, coding is BORING, but coding is hyped so
| much that people have high expectations so you get delusional
| people coming and signing up to your website.
| gwd wrote:
| It sounds like his model was: "Make a non-profit org to do
| something useful for society, get funding from orgs that have
| money and want useful things done"; and it sounds like the
| problem he had was that orgs that want useful things done are
| often too specific.
|
| E.g., there are orgs to promote computer literacy among women;
| and among poor people in India; and among middle-schoolers in
| Africa, and so on. And he has users who are women, and who ware
| poor people in India, and who are middle-schoolers in Africa,
| and so on. But none of the orgs will give him a grant, because
| they can't guarantee the money will _only_ be spent for their
| own target groups.
|
| I can see why that would be kind of discouraging.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I read the comment more narrowly. I think he's lost faith in
| _Exercism 's specific non-profit model_, not non-profit models
| in general.
| bee_rider wrote:
| He wrote:
|
| "I think it's fair to say that at this stage I've lost faith in
| the nonprofit business model working in a way that allows
| Exercism to reach any of its potential."
|
| Which provides additional context. Why'd you remove it? It
| makes it clear that he's talking about the non-profit business
| model as applied to his company.
| sneak wrote:
| Why not charge 5000 users money instead of servicing 2M users for
| free?
|
| It seems to me if you can't get 1 in 500 of your users to give
| you $10 per year then maybe your product isn't actually valuable
| or useful and should just shut down.
|
| I say this without knowing anything whatsoever about this product
| or its utility; it just seems like a general thing. If you have
| this many signups and you can't charge even a tiny tiny fraction
| of them, it means the signup number is irrelevant.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| They're charging 4000 users. The paywall is ethical.
| galactus wrote:
| They say in the article they tried to force 1000 random users
| to convert to paying account and none of them did
| grardb wrote:
| Can you point out where they said this?
| thunderbong wrote:
| The title has a typo - it's Exercism, not Exercise.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Fixed now.
|
| Submitted title was "Exercise has 2M users but no money in the
| bank". Solution is not to fix the typo but to follow the site
| guidelines: " _Please use the original title, unless it is
| misleading or linkbait_ ". It's not necessary to add the
| company name since the domain is displayed next to the title.
| benreesman wrote:
| Where the fuck are the VCs looking at serious hackers with
| millions of users who haven't gotten the business model dialed in
| yet?
|
| Y-Combinator says "build something people want". Two million
| sounds like a lot of people.
|
| I've only glanced over this so I could be missing some critical
| fact, but superficially it sounds like pmarca or pg should write
| a check before the rest of us stop believing in the startup
| lottery.
| EduardoBautista wrote:
| Well, exercism is a "not-for-profit organisation registered in
| the UK" according to the footer of their website.
|
| Edit: It appears that their "not-for-profit" message in their
| footer is a bit misleading, as explained by those who replied
| to my comment.
| benreesman wrote:
| OpenAI is a 501c nonprofit. Doesn't stop Sam taking big time
| meetings more often than he checks his email.
| LunaSea wrote:
| Part of OpenAI is a nonprofit, not in its entirety.
| benreesman wrote:
| Matt Levine uses a diagram to allude to the complexity.
| And that was before Larry Summers and the National
| Security Administration got involved.
|
| A better term for OpenAI would be "rogue state".
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who
| -co...
| choult wrote:
| They're not officially a non-profit, they're a limited
| company. Obviously they can still operate as such - that's
| down to the board how they distribute profits via dividends,
| so they might choose to do so.
|
| A true non-profit company in the UK would be a registered
| Community Interest Company, or a registered Charity.
| ihid wrote:
| Hello. This isn't actually correct. Exercism is a Company
| Limited by Guarantee. It has no shareholders. It can't pay
| dividends.
|
| Community Interest Companies do have sharedholders and can
| pay dividends. CIC's are definitely not charities in the
| scope of the word that you're using it.
| physicsguy wrote:
| They've not set up the structures for it to be not-for-profit
| here, they're just an ordinary registered company.
|
| Typically you'd form a Charitable Trust or Charitable
| Incorporated Organisation, and Exercism isn't listed as
| either on the Charity Comission website.
| ihid wrote:
| I've replied to this further down. Exercism is a nonprofit -
| we have no shareholders. We've had many large organisations
| donate to us (including Mozilla and Google) who have vetted
| all this.
| surfingdino wrote:
| > Where the fuck are the VCs looking at serious hackers with
| millions of users who haven't gotten the business model dialed
| in yet?
|
| Busy investing in AI?
| blitzar wrote:
| These guys should "pivot to AI". Should be able to get a full
| B for an Ai company with 2 million users.
| benreesman wrote:
| Fuck I'll train a LLaMA tune for them on Saturday(s)
| gratis.
| re-thc wrote:
| So Exercism AI?
| kevmo314 wrote:
| Sell the code submissions as training data.
| renewiltord wrote:
| There's nothing special about a VC. It's just someone with
| money to allocate. Go ask them to give you a big chunk of the
| company for $25k if you think this is just a few steps from
| being a blow-up success. Being able to differentially detect
| when a company is successful is a pretty good skill. If you
| think you've found a diamond in the rough, you should go in.
| benreesman wrote:
| This absurd hagiography about efficient markets allocating
| capital will be viewed by future historians like some kind of
| flat earth theory. Eugene Fama himself is walking back the
| idea and he won a Nobel Prize for asserting it.
|
| Markets are what people do when they're not having sex. No
| sense in fighting markets.
|
| Cartels and market failures are what happens when the holders
| of capital aren't terrified of Lina Khan or Maximilian
| Robespierre for longer than 12 seconds.
|
| The Battery Club is for kingmakers who decide things together
| for their mutual benefit behind closed doors. They learned
| their lesson after Don't Poach Gate: it's not in writing
| anymore.
| ozim wrote:
| Only real metric I see is 800 monthly donors and $7500 from
| them ($10 per person) - that's what that business is worth,
| those are really people that want (they pay so that's what
| matters).
|
| Having 1600 people sign in daily and never logging back again -
| creating 2M zombie accounts is I suppose critical fact that you
| are missing.
| benreesman wrote:
| If it's two million churned out dead accounts, non-replaced,
| and 800 actual people who care then the author of the post
| was posting in bad faith and I'd retract my remark.
|
| To get from 800 real people to two million user id rows one
| would be running some kind of spam scam, and if that's the
| case I apologize.
| ozim wrote:
| I don't think it is case of spam scam.
|
| I do think they really can have legit sign ups, but people
| "wanting to learn code" usually fizzle out quick. I have my
| experience as a dev when friends/family/colleagues ask for
| guidance, I provide them with links resources and some
| mentoring and after 2-3 days they don't follow up ever
| again.
|
| But not using metric like daily active users, returning
| users, might indicate that they want to inflate their worth
| or they convinced themselves to believe in the wrong
| metric.
| benreesman wrote:
| Oh I don't doubt for a minute that there's some gap here.
| But the key people are serious enough to list rigorous
| code review as a core value in the next breath after "I
| just stopped paying everyone including myself."
|
| If the millions of users thing is even a little real,
| that's a galactically less risky play than friggin
| LangChain for Pets or whatever.
|
| I hope I'm being paranoid but I get the sense that
| someone pissed off someone important.
| ahstilde wrote:
| Well, the standard quote leaves out "and will pay for"
| andrewstuart wrote:
| How can there be NO money in 2 million users?
| aswerty wrote:
| I would be more interested in active users. I have had personal
| projects with 100s of registered users yet I was the only one
| who actually used it. So 2M users might translate to somewhere
| between 1000 and 10000 unique users per month. Considering the
| niche; many of them young people with very little discretionary
| spending money.
| ihid wrote:
| We have about 70,000 MAU.
|
| People tend to spend an intense few weeks learning a
| language, then disappear for a year. Then come back and learn
| another language. A large part of the 2M is still "alive" (I
| don't know exactly what number that would be, but I'd think
| around 600k) but Exercism isn't the sort of product you use
| day-in-day-out.
| Lionga wrote:
| At 1.500 signups per day (45K a month) 70,000 MAU are
| horrible retention. Usually you need about 10 times MAU to
| signups. Unless you can make that happen you have nothing
| that people actually use and not just try out.
| ihid wrote:
| It takes people about a month to work through a language
| track, learn the language, and get on with their life. So
| I wouldn't _expect_ to have more than 45k MAU. 70k MAU is
| because people LIKE the site and come back to learn
| another language.
|
| We're not trying to be some business that sucks people
| into using our site every day and monetise them. We're
| aiming to teach people effectively and efficiently and
| then get them moving on with their lives.
|
| We could make the site less efficient, or change it's
| purpose, but that's not the mission of the organisation.
| Lionga wrote:
| If there is nobody using your service for more than half
| a month (at that point they would mostly already be
| counted for 2 months) almost nobody will ever pay. What
| is your day 7, day 30 and/or day90 retention?
|
| If is low all you can do is lower costs, which should
| also be straightforward.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| They have 800 monthly donors totalling $7,500 per month. That
| is some long tail but I doubt the 2 million are active users.
| Oras wrote:
| I'm just thinking out loud here, but for 2 million users learning
| to code and improving their skills, there is a chance they want
| to change jobs or are already looking for one.
|
| Have you thought of adding a hiring feature? Where people upload
| their CVs, and companies search (anonymously) for talent?
|
| There is a hiring model called PPA (Pay Per Application), or
| monthly fees to search CVs.
|
| Your unique selling point would be companies are not getting
| hundreds of custom AI CVs flooding their application; they search
| for what they want, and you're helping both sides.
|
| Good luck!
|
| edit: grammar
| zurfer wrote:
| even easier, just a job board (like stackoverflow), where
| companies pay to advertise a job.
| rkowalick wrote:
| the job board could even pitch jobs in the language an
| exercism user is currently learning
| authorfly wrote:
| This is a tarpit monetisation method unfortunately. (I learnt
| the hard way) It's common for student ideas too (as in ideas
| with students/recent graduates as endusers/customers).
|
| The general argument is - we can specifically identify talent
| and motivated learners/skill-possessing people, who will look
| for jobs. That's exactly what companies need and companies pay
| $5k-$10k a head during good markets for this rare STEM skill,
| like programming!
|
| Problem - The people on these platforms are 70% likely to give
| up within 6 months or go into another field
|
| Problem - Experience means 10x more than education to
| employers, especially fundamental experience
|
| Problem - Your information on potential hires as the provider
| becomes outdated fast and supply-demand changes in hiring
| market can reduce your commissions by 50-75% in one year (as
| happened from 2022-2023)
|
| I would go as far as saying these users - because they are
| typically earlier career - are actually worse for connecting
| with jobs boards/hiring than literally any random iPhone user
| for advertising purposes. And companies don't pay much to
| advertise to random iPhone users. I wish it wasn't so, but it
| is so according to how companies act.
|
| If OP wants to monetise this way they should consider an
| affiliate programme to a CV upload or Jobs board site, it will
| test any appetite for hiring these people at the moment much
| quicker.
| ihid wrote:
| It's also worth pointing out the Exercism isn't for coding
| newbies - it's for developers learning new languages. This
| often gets missed.
| sickblastoise wrote:
| I think this is a major selling point. If developers could
| upload their CVs, exercise could package together the users
| yoe + industry experience with the users learning veracity +
| main language. I think that would be a solid product that
| hiring people would pay money for.
| lolinder wrote:
| Shouldn't that make it even easier to monetize? I appreciate
| the resolve to keep things free for those who can't afford to
| pay, but a lot of your users are presumably actively employed
| making 6 figures.
|
| You could follow the Sublime Text model and basically have an
| honor system--if you're actively employed making more than
| $X, please pay us. If you're not, you're welcome to use it
| for free!
|
| The Tech Resume Inside Out [0] uses this model (though not on
| the honor system) for similar reasons.
|
| [0] https://thetechresume.com/
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| > For the last few months, I've been working on a new educational
| product teaching coding fundamentals that I'm going to launch in
| 2025. 96% of people who try to learn coding give up - which I
| find unacceptable, so I'm aiming to change that.
|
| Feels like you've been kickstarting a competitor/pivot on the
| side.
| elAhmo wrote:
| With those stats, even with just 4% of people wanting to learn,
| and just a fraction of them actually paying, that would be
| dozens of thousands of paying customers. Even at 1USD per
| month, it seems a relatively sustainable business.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Yeah, I think he is confusing "non-profit" with "non-
| payment". You can have a non-profit company with paying
| customers. I think he need to take a basic economics class.
| sealeck wrote:
| I think the tone of this comment is unnecessarily condemning
| (apologies if I am reading it incorrectly) - I can totally
| understand why someone who has worked for years on a non-profit
| business which has created a lot of value for people (I think
| exercism is pretty good software) might want to be able to at
| least pay themself.
| kelnos wrote:
| Non-profit doesn't mean you didn't get to pay yourself. It
| just means that any revenue that exceeds expenses must be
| reinvested into the business.
| slkjdlskjdklsd wrote:
| That sounds like Amazon to me.
| JCharante wrote:
| Except amazon shares would be worth much less if there
| was a promise of no dividends ever
| ihid wrote:
| Thanks, yeah. New product will hopefully mean I can keep
| funding and growing exercism. They're very synergistic and
| will support each other.
| JCharante wrote:
| Charging people $1 on sign-up would probably lower that 96%
| metric
| heeton wrote:
| I don't know if Jeremy will see this, but:
|
| At my org it's hard to get justification for donations.
|
| However if this was something like ~100$ a year or whatever per
| dev, I'd be paying it today for my team.
| throwaway2225 wrote:
| I remember reading an article about a non-profit discovering a
| work around for this problem.
|
| They created a subscription plan that had no real value except
| maybe adding some trivial "feature" like a gold star next to
| their name (I don't remember the details). This made it
| possible for the companies to receive a standard invoice that
| had a greater chance of approval.
| whatevaa wrote:
| Yeah, can't justify donation to corporate, need some reason
| to pay for stuff.
| ihid wrote:
| Hello :)
|
| Appreciate the comment. If you have thoughts on that, I'd love
| to hear them here: https://forum.exercism.org/t/exercism-teams-
| coming-soon/1266...
| napoleoncomplex wrote:
| Maybe this will be helpful to the author (partially already
| mentioned):
|
| - Nonprofit business model does not equal "everything is free for
| the user forever", I'm guessing you already know that, but the
| wording on why you don't believe in nonprofit business models
| explicitly mentioned keeping everything free as the reason. You
| can earn revenue from users in a nonprofit business.
|
| - You have a big audience with good engagement for the segment,
| there are multiple ways to make money without abandoning the core
| mission (job boards, screencast upsells for advanced courses,
| premium content, whatever else, look at how Remoteok.com makes
| money, copy-paste as the founder is super open on his process)
|
| - Being a for-profit business and fundraising, will temporarily
| solve your issue of having funds to run a business. It will not
| solve the issue of not knowing how to/being afraid to charge
| users or other parties for the value they get out of your
| product. You could already be solving this problem today, and you
| have a 2million audience pipeline built in to solve that issue.
|
| I'm not dismissing the challenge of some business segments being
| extremely difficult to make money in despite the value being
| meaningful, I work in healthcare, so I know, but since your new
| business will effectively be in the same segment, do focus on the
| revenue aspect much sooner and much than you think you'll need
| to, because you already know what happens if you don't.
|
| And big respect for what you've built in a super crowded space,
| you obviously have the product and user empathy chops needed,
| wishing you the best of luck on nailing the business chops!
| leetsbehonest wrote:
| I just don't agree with this leetcode industry. That, recruiters
| and the whole tech hiring industry that has spun off from a
| process originally intended to get to know and gain confidence in
| a potential employee. It is just I have doubts in the educational
| help these platforms really deliver given that there are already
| so many resources to learn these days say compared to 20y ago.
| ihid wrote:
| We're not really part of the "leetcode industry". People have
| used Exercism to learn new programming languages for a decade.
| We've deliberately not wanted to become a place of competition
| or a recruitment space. We've always focused on helping people
| learn based on their intrinsic motivations.
| leetsbehonest wrote:
| Sorry you are right, what I posted isn't fair. I should have
| read more into it.
| ihid wrote:
| No problem. Thanks for acknowledging that! :)
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| The biggest issue I had with the tech boom and the current tech
| culture is when they replaced "profit" with "people" as a metric
| of success. To me they took the phrase "people over profit" and
| turned it into "people are profit".
|
| It is time investors businesses and started looking at the bottom
| line again, even non-profits. I mean can you imagine if we based
| the success of a store with how many people walked in even if
| they did not buy anything?
|
| Even non-profits need to make money, so their business model was
| either wrong or they do not have a product worth paying for. On
| top of that we are probably in economic stagflation so we will be
| seeing more stories like this as the months go on.
| rurban wrote:
| This are the LinkedIn comments on this post:
| https://www.linkedin.com/posts/exercism_activity-72374803032...
| physicsguy wrote:
| This is the problem with ed-techs. Nobody wants to pay. Those
| that do (Universities, schools) are also competing with the
| platforms to some degree.
| xrd wrote:
| This is one of the saddest posts I've read in a long time.
|
| I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from
| CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect
| coding school environment.
|
| So, I'm sad it isn't viable.
|
| But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second
| guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess
| the people behind most of the comments, I would assume no one has
| ever run a business with payroll, or built something with this
| much reach. The comments ring really hollow for the most part and
| seem really callous given this person has sunk his life into
| making the world, and my life, a better place. I'm scared for the
| moment he is in life and sad there are not more positive
| comments, and even better, comments from people where they would
| actually help by making a donation.
| ihid wrote:
| Thank you for being so kind and supportive. I really appreciate
| your comment.
|
| I'm ok. I'm hopeful for the future. I believe there's lots of
| amazing stuff we can do and that Exercism has a great future.
| But right now it's in a hard, low place. The last few months
| have been pretty tough emotionally, but I think getting to this
| place is one of acceptance. The only direction now is up :)
| xrd wrote:
| I've gotten so much from your site. I'm sorry you have put so
| much in of yourself and haven't been able to make it work
| financially.
|
| Would you email me (chris@extrastatic.com). I've got a few
| people I think would help depending on what direction you
| want to go in.
| ihid wrote:
| Done, although I emailed the email in your profile. I'll
| send it to that one too :)
| stavros wrote:
| Can you please just add a paid tier before shutting down?
| Just a $5/mo something that shows a badge on your account, or
| whatever. Call it something other than "donate", "premium
| account" or something, and see how many people pick it up.
| You "only" need 1500 people to do that to cover the costs,
| which is less than a thousandth of your user base.
|
| Even if it gives a few useful features to subscribers, that's
| better than shutting down.
| dustincoates wrote:
| They have a paid tier, called insiders, although you can
| also "pay" through helping other users on the site:
| https://exercism.org/insiders
| stavros wrote:
| Ah, thanks, I looked for that but didn't find it (the
| "donate" button reminded me of a one-off). I'd recommend
| changing the link name to "pricing" and A/B testing the
| recommended donation amount being $5/mo.
|
| I don't know how much effort they've put into
| experimenting with pricing, but it'd be worth trying to
| increase donations, especially for such a well-designed
| site.
| joker99 wrote:
| Never knew they had this, signed up immediately :)
| Exercism is worthy of 120$ a year and worth its weight in
| gold. It has helped me learn Rust, Swift and Kotlin and
| I'll be forever greatful!
| ihid wrote:
| We're not shutting down :)
|
| But yes, rather than shutting down, I'd probably just put
| the whole thing behind a paywall to try and keep it alive.
| stavros wrote:
| Well yes, I mean "maintenance mode" or whatever it is.
| You've built a really valuable service, if you want some
| help with maybe reducing costs, I'd be happy to have a
| chat at some point, I have experience in running things
| on budget hardware.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| I had no idea you were in financial straits and was just
| using Exercism yesterday to teach myself a new language. I've
| really appreciated the platform and it's already helped me
| learn so much.
|
| I'm donating today and I wish you the best.
| ihid wrote:
| Thank you so much for commenting. Always awesome to hear
| about from the people exercism has helped.
| KoftaBob wrote:
| > I think it's fair to say that at this stage I've lost faith in
| the nonprofit business model working in a way that allows
| Exercism to reach any of its potential. Keeping something free
| for everyone relies on either the user being the product, or on
| significant donations, and without either, it's very hard to
| grow.
|
| Non-profit =/= the product is free. The vast majority of
| hospitals and universities are non-profit, and their
| product/service sure as hell isn't free.
|
| Nonprofits operate under a non-distribution constraint, meaning
| any surplus revenues must be reinvested into the organization's
| mission rather than distributed to private ownership.
|
| What they've lost faith in is running a business with a free
| product.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| At some point they messed up their login with google captcha
| stuff. From the moment I discovered this new state of affairs, I
| have avoided exercism. A shame, that they ruined it.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Just donated a small amount. I think this is a nice service, and
| can think of a couple of friends who struggle with programming
| (professionally!) but are too embarrassed to ask and progress,
| and could make use of this service.
|
| I hear the pain-points about the donation-driven model not rising
| to the task, but I do wonder how prominent that particular call
| to action is on the site. On one hand you don't want to bombard
| your users with annoying jimmy-wales-style boo-hoo donation
| banners. On the other hand you don't want your users to be
| completely oblivious to the fact that their favourite service is
| about to be shut down if everybody thinks that "it's ok, they
| probably have enough money / I wouldn't make a difference
| anyway".
|
| Have you considered having a discreet yet prominent progress bar
| on the website, showing your monthly donation needs/goals? This
| could act as a good prompt for users to consider donating. One
| suggestion would be to accompany this by an information button,
| which when clicked takes you to a page explaining the different
| costs that need to be covered, where your money goes when you
| donate, and a detailed breakdown of what is currently still
| required / missing. Optics-wise, I would also try to find a way
| to differentiate between "large" donors and donation "trickles".
| E.g. you could color code on that progress bar different "tiers"
| of donation (or perhaps display this separately as a pie-chart in
| the breakdown information page). The point of this is to show to
| people who might be tempted to donate "small" amounts but are
| sitting on the fence because they don't think it'll make a
| difference, that it "can" actually make a cumulative difference,
| and push that kind of user past that threshold and donate
| "something".
|
| Alternatively / additionally (you may do this already), if and
| when you see that a user has already extracted value from your
| service, such as, e.g., when they have submitted their 100th
| exercise, you could show a "congratulations" banner that says
| that you hope they're finding the service useful, and politely
| asks them if they could consider donating (oftentimes worded as
| "buy us a beer or two"). If they decide to donate, then after
| their donation, you could also have a tickbox at the bottom of
| this banner to ask in a respectful manner (i.e. not a dark-
| pattern-worded / confirmshaming one) if they would like to be
| reminded again after some time / number of exercises, or if they
| simply prefer to make a one-off donation and that's fine.
|
| Finally, depending on your resources, if people "do" buy you a
| "beer", it would also be a nice touch to thank them for it, in an
| as personalised a manner as possible. Better yet, you could give
| them some sort of 'reward' / 'recognition' on the site; e.g. I
| think something silly such as revealing a hidden feature that
| allows a user to then tick a box to add a silly 'holding a beer'
| overlay to their avatar icon (in a similar way to how
| stackoverflow gives 'hats' close to christmas time), would
| actually go a long way to motivate people, after seeing these
| beer mugs on other people's avatars. And it's "silly" enough that
| people might donate to get this just for the fun and silliness of
| it.
|
| The donation model is an odd one. Obviously, not everyone
| donates, but I think given some prompting and lack of friction in
| doing so, there's a significant number of people who _would_ be
| inclined to donate out of a sense of gratitude, but who don 't do
| so if they haven't been given a reasonable opportunity /
| visibility to do so, or some sort of confirmation that their
| donation doesn't just go to greedy shareholders on top of some
| sort of pre-existing dodgy revenue stream, but makes an actual
| difference to real people running the service.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| So you need to charge, but don't want to lie about the 100% free
| part even though you can change that
|
| So you need to upcharge. It is 100% free... to start
|
| and then there is a subscription that is paid to finish the
| language course, shown in monthly cost but charged annually by
| default
|
| more languages? charge more
|
| You can sell the account data to recruitment firms. Everyone
| hates this but you know that your users are the product, your
| users know that they are supposed to be the product. Keep a cut
| with the recruiters so they have to pay you a little commission
| when candidates land a job
| acureau wrote:
| I'm not sure whether to be appalled by your suggestions or
| impressed by your blatancy
| yieldcrv wrote:
| wait till you see educative.io's pricing then
|
| 85% off on the annual plan, just that it's $200, but at least
| you're not paying $99/month anymore
|
| the interesting thing about the _not_ "not-for-profit" model
| is that all you have to do is just undercut educative.io by a
| tiny bit
| NoblePublius wrote:
| Crazy idea: charge $1
| cheema33 wrote:
| Charing $1 is harder than it sounds. Many commercial
| transactions have a minimum "service fee" that would eat into
| that $1.
|
| But $12/yr. is probably doable.
| efitz wrote:
| From the article: > "I've lost faith in the nonprofit business
| model".
|
| There's your problem right there. Investors want profit. If you
| want investors then you have to convince them you'll deliver ROI.
|
| Altruism is not a business model. There is nothing wrong with
| altruism but it is not compatible (except in short term or
| insignificant ways) with most of the business world, which is
| profit driven.
| mdgrech23 wrote:
| I think it's fair to say we need a new model, just saying but
| all of that is way bigger than me or you or Exercism.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Non profit doesn't mean you survive on donations. Non profit
| can still charge money to keep the lights on. If you have 2M
| users, charging $0.50/year for use can still get you $1M to run
| your business.
|
| Edit: I think the comment was taken quite literally. The point
| I was trying to make was that the user base exists,
| monetization for profit is definitely hard, but monetization
| for keeping the lights on can work. You could try a flat fee
| for all users, you could do seasonal exclusive contents to
| support the platform, you could try selling merch, you could
| literally put a banner annually like Wikipedia does etc. The
| point being, if you have 2M users and you provide enough value,
| there are ways to make it work. Donations unfortunately don't
| work, because it's not top of mind for people and people need a
| little pushing.
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| this isn't at all realistic; a tiny fraction of free users
| are going to be willing to pay for your product.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Updated the comment with clarifications.
| mrmuagi wrote:
| As a side point I was curious how low you can charge given
| processing fees, and you'll have to charge $1 to get $0.50
| cents roughly (checked Stripe/Paypal for my currency CAD).
| darth_avocado wrote:
| Updated the comment with clarification
| bee_rider wrote:
| He wrote:
|
| "I think it's fair to say that at this stage I've lost faith in
| the nonprofit business model working in a way that allows
| Exercism to reach any of its potential."
|
| Removing the context that makes it clear that a quote is only
| applying to a very limited situation is a bit dishonest.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be
| measured in usage/reach, not $).
|
| You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge
| a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even
| students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get
| 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than
| you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves
| costs money).
|
| It can still be non-profit (which is a great thing), so no one is
| getting rich off of it, and it doesn't poison the mission. But it
| could pay the bills.
|
| Update: Processing fees are a problem as posters have pointed
| out, so you'd probably want to make it $10/year, or $5/six
| months. It's still an easily decision for a very large number of
| people.
|
| Patreon has $1/month options, not sure how they do it though.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| I think this makes a lot of sense. Same model as TryHackMe.
| charlie0 wrote:
| Would $1/month even be worth it? It seems payment processors
| would take a big chunk out of that $1, which is why I very
| rarely see monthly subs of that amount.
| whatevaa wrote:
| Yeah, if you want that little, do Bitwardens $10 a year. $1
| transactions are ripe for abuse, checking if cards are
| active.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| You'd probably want to charge $10/year (once) rather than
| $1/month. It's still an easy choice for many people (of
| course still inaccessible for students in some countries).
| zip1234 wrote:
| Another option is to make deals with universities or
| schools for access for their students where they pay a
| certain amount per year and the students can all have
| access
| rammer wrote:
| Uni sales cycles are horrendous. take forever and fickle
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Yeah, that would be a __lot__ of overhead. Not worth it.
| I'd instead focus on trying to find sponsors ("$100 /
| month allows us to give a free account to 100 students in
| X countries!")
| gradyfps wrote:
| Some payment processors have "micropayment" fee structures,
| where they take a higher % (5% in PayPal's case) for a lower
| fixed fee per transaction.
|
| PayPal's traditional fee (for USD)[1] = 3.49% + $.3, for $1 =
| $0.3349
|
| PayPal's micropayment fee (for USD)[2] = 4.99% + $.09, for $1
| = $0.1349
|
| Using that model would make sense in OP's case.
|
| [1]: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-
| fees#statemen...
|
| [2]: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-
| fees#micropay...
| datavirtue wrote:
| Well, it's $12 a year. I always pay a sub for a year or two
| if it's that low.
| chris_pie wrote:
| Don't most payment platforms have a constant minimum fee per
| transaction? That would hurt you at a $1 price.
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| Yeah their minimum is $10, which for me, I can only justify if
| I daily your project, or use it frequently. I love the site,
| but I don't use it nearly enough to justify this cost. $5 I
| might forget about. There's a site I rarely use that I pay
| $3.99 for, because its <= $5.
|
| I'm guessing fees make it not worthwhile, maybe they should
| negotiate lowered fees from their payment service, or figure
| out someone else who would give them drastically lower fee
| rates.
| dartharva wrote:
| There will still be plenty of students (mainly from outside of
| the West) who will immediately lose access if anything gets
| paywalled by even a cent because of various reasons.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Yes, for sure. You could make it free for users in X
| countries, based on IP. Yes, people elsewhere could use a VPN
| to get around it and use it for free but you're charging so
| little that anyone who can afford or has a mechanism to pay
| won't go through the trouble.
| wslh wrote:
| > Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success
| should be measured in usage/reach, not $).
|
| Most organizations aim to survive as long as possible, so
| financial sustainability ($) is crucial.
| smt88 wrote:
| > _Success should be measured in usage /reach, not $_
|
| What? No.
|
| If a business isn't able to sustain itself with its revenue, it
| has failed and will need to shut down. That's the definition of
| failure.
|
| Lots of things can be "successful" by your metric by using
| unsustainable pricing.
| thinkr42 wrote:
| This entirely. You can't eat using "good feelings" / "impact"
| alone.
| madamelic wrote:
| Also the whole non-profit angle is immature in my opinion.
|
| Non-profits denote nothing about their financial good-
| standing or moral good-standing. You can be an amoral non-
| profit, a moral for-profit or vice-versa. Your profit
| structure has nothing to do with the morals of the people
| inside of it.
|
| Additionally, there a lot of non-profit executives that are
| profiting very healthily off of their work.
| twojacobtwo wrote:
| Non-profit simply tells people what the
| incentives/motivations are or are not.
|
| The average for-profit company can't be trusted/expected
| to do what's best for anyone outside the profit structure
| (e.g. users or the public at large). Of course you can
| have exceptions in either direction, but on average for-
| profit orgs will likely be willing to fuck over anyone
| else to increase profits - intentionally or not - because
| profit growth is literally their purpose.
|
| 'Non-profit' advertises that you don't have to worry
| about that specific, powerful motivation of the org
| contending with your best interests.
| mlyle wrote:
| Unfortunately, in practice, this isn't really true.
|
| It's a less powerful motivation, in that there are not
| shareholders who will benefit from growth.
|
| But in practice, executives and managers end up making
| more, which provides an incentive for growth.
| mlyle wrote:
| Not everything beneficial to the world has a viable
| business model.
|
| In the best case, you get to change the world _and_ make a
| bunch of money. Sometimes, you just have a viable business
| selling sugar water. And other times, you 're doing
| something really good that's just not going to get you
| paid.
|
| There's nothing wrong with the last thing, other than its
| potential lack of sustainability.
|
| I'm now a teacher; I could easily make 10x my comp
| elsewhere; possibly 100x. Measured on your scale, the only
| value is what I'm getting paid. But it turns out that those
| good feelings are worth something to me.
| kevmo314 wrote:
| I don't think anyone is arguing that the good feelings
| aren't worth anything but rather that we are all humans
| with mouths to feed at the end of the day. If your comp
| went down 90% or even started costing you substantial
| money, at some point you too would probably reconsider
| being a teacher.
| ihid wrote:
| > And other times, you're doing something really good
| that's just not going to get you paid.
|
| This. I feel that this has been missed in the thread a
| little.
| TheNewsIsHere wrote:
| Yeah, you can't deposit vibes at the bank, and employees
| can't pay their mortgages with them either.
|
| A sustainable business demands some kind of ongoing income.
| KolmogorovComp wrote:
| From TFA, they're not a business, they're non-profit.
| smt88 wrote:
| Nonprofits are businesses.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It may not be successful long-term with this model, but it's
| been very successful so far.
| dmurray wrote:
| How does it not "poison the mission" if it means 99% of users
| drop the platform?
| MrDresden wrote:
| Does that even matter if the mission is dead?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| that's one percent more success at the mission than you have
| if you're forced to turn the servers off because you can't
| pay the bills. Money's to an organization what's oxygen is to
| a body, before you go and plan any missions you need to be
| able to sustain yourself.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Fair point. I used 1% at the very low end -- if the amount is
| small enough (in the $1/month range) I think the opt-in rate
| would be much higher.
|
| I would then give a free account to anyone who asks. ("We
| know that even $1/month is a big ask for some folks in
| certain countries or they may even have a method by which to
| pay it. If that's you, let us know and apply for a free
| account here.") Then basically auto-approve (with some bot-
| screening mechanism) accounts that apply. Sure you'll get
| some abuse and people lying, but not that many people are
| going to lie just to save $1/month.
| ocean_moist wrote:
| The only way out for something like this to stay afloat is to be
| subsidized by a big tech company.
|
| $7,500 monthly is nothing to a large tech company. It sort of
| does makes sense for big companies to subsidize this so that the
| quality and amount of software engineers that join their company
| increases.
|
| This value prop is intangible, but I feel like at least one big
| company would go for it.
| fastball wrote:
| Well... they could charge for it.
| pico303 wrote:
| The $7500 jumped out at me, but for a different reason. This
| seems awfully high for a site with 2 million registered users.
| I feel like some backend optimization could get than number way
| down ($1000/mo?).
|
| What is all this computing power going towards?
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I imagine they need to run code for their exercises on a
| server. There are probably lots of ways to optimize that, and
| perhaps even ways to get the code running in the browser via
| webassembly or something, but all of these things require
| technical expertise and time.
| computerdork wrote:
| That's interesting. Well, they are coding gurus, so maybe
| it's feasible :)
| Lionga wrote:
| It is going straight to Jeff Bezos pocket selling them
| servers at at 10 to 20 times markup then reasonable
| squigglydonut wrote:
| agreed. this can be optimized by the community. Sometimes,
| and I'm not saying this happened I am just saying that
| sometimes engineers have a strong desire to over-engineer and
| that might be costing money. Also want to add that maybe you
| can get approved for AWS for startups for example and migrate
| some compute there.
| dlahoda wrote:
| Tried to donate in crypto, failed. Bad UX. May I have just
| address and chain to send to?
| fredgrott wrote:
| I wonder why this would not be a fit for GitHub and
| Microsoft...seems like it could complement GitHub...
| bloopernova wrote:
| :( exercism has been great. I've been subscribed to the insiders
| program for more than a year now, I wish I could help more.
| huijzer wrote:
| > We've tried a lot of things to change that. We've spoken to
| hundreds of funders and companies,
|
| The goal isn't to get investors! It is to get money from
| customers. A lot of startups seem to get this wrong.
| lolinder wrote:
| This is apparently a nonprofit, not a startup. They weren't
| looking for investors, they were looking for donors.
| dartharva wrote:
| Can't you just add in Wikipedia-style donation request
| popup/banners for everyone in general? I reckon plenty of people
| will be willing to spare some change even multiple times when
| they log on, just like they do with Wikipedia.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| If anything Wikipedia as an example of how unsuccessful a
| voluntary donation model is.
|
| 0.2% of people who use wikipedia donate to it. Unless you are
| doing tens of millions of unique views a month, it's probably
| not gonna be sustainable.
|
| People _really_ hate paying for things. Even things they use
| and love.
| deisteve wrote:
| the only way is to lower your operating costs but you are
| correct ppl on the internet simply do not like paying for
| stuff even donating is a tough ask.
|
| even getting people to click on affiliate links that won't
| cost them anything I find is tough as most people remove the
| referral link or purchase on another device probably out of
| privacy concerns.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Also it's a subtraction from the legitimacy bank account.
| It's well known that Wikipedia _doesn 't need those
| donations_.
|
| Endless telethons for public television in America annoy 100
| people for every one that donates. Despite that you see ads
| on public TV for the Archer Daniels Midland corporation all
| the time even though, allegedly, there is no advertising on
| public TV.
| quesera wrote:
| I don't know enough about Wikipedia, though I have heard
| this point made before.
|
| I do know a lot about noncommercial broadcasting in the US
| though, and your comments appear superficial.
|
| A sponsorship message is different from a call-to-action
| advertisement. The former is permitted, the latter is not.
| They are not different enough, in my opinion, but they are
| discernible.
|
| Public TV and radio station finances are public
| information. Audience fundraisers are a meaningful portion
| of their operating budget (~25-50%), though it varies by
| market. As are program underwriting (up to 50% in strong
| markets), and often CPB funds contribute a few points (this
| is highly politicized and if you overindex on it, your news
| sources are likely polluted).
| bluepuma77 wrote:
| Switch hosting model. Assuming you run expensive cloud services
| for $7500.
|
| Get some inexpensive bare metal servers and you maybe can save
| 80% cost.
| lolinder wrote:
| Their model may be one of the few that would truly be quite
| challenging to pull off with bare metal--running sandboxed code
| for 73 languages is hard to do economically with any setup, but
| being able to lean on cloud services for provisioning would
| make it much more achievable.
| deisteve wrote:
| ah I see that might be a bit more tricky. I was wondering why
| the costs were so high.
|
| For example, I serve roughly 3 million users on a $40/month
| VPS. I only run Postgres + Django, if I use Supabase and all
| these other fancy cloud SaaS I wouldn't be able to sustain it
| as the costs would increase 10~20x fold.
| kiwicopple wrote:
| (supabase ceo)
|
| our postgres offering costs roughly equivalent of RDS so if
| you use it with Django I don't think you will come close to
| 20-40x a VPS, ymmv, depending on your workload
|
| We have an Auth service, but since you use Django you
| wouldn't need it - sounds like you'd only need postgres
| (like a lot of our customers)
| timc3 wrote:
| I don't think you get the point. RDS is expensive, just
| because you having pricing parity with it doesn't mean
| that you are going to be at the same pricing level as
| cheap hosting.
|
| And thats fine, you have features on top that can be
| worth paying for certain customers and expenses of your
| own to pay. Those of us that have been around in this
| business for 30 years know how expensive PAAS and IAAS
| can be and how easy it is to roll your own solutions and
| when not to do that.
| breck wrote:
| Nice post! Nice site! I just added 70 links from PLDB to your
| site.
|
| Some thoughts before I donate:
|
| > I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model
|
| Great! You will find a way to generate revenue streams. This is a
| good pivot! I would recommend going fully open source and public
| domain as you add a profit model. IMO public domain for-profit
| companies are superior to (C) non-profit companies. Profits don't
| make you evil, closed source and copyright does.
|
| > every PR in a live Exercism repository should get a review
| before it can be merged
|
| Why? I recommend just merging in. Quickly fixing/undoing
| problematic commits.
|
| > $7,500 in monthly donations. That covers our server cost
|
| OMG!!! Stop! This money should go to you 3, not cloud providers.
|
| Server costs should be $0. This should be a local first, entirely
| client side site. Maybe 1 $50 a month droplet if you need some
| read/write user stuff. With less than 100K active users in a day,
| 1 server should be more than enough.
|
| Finally, ditch the (c) symbol at bottom. Go public domain!
|
| Here's my user test and authoring of this comment:
| https://www.loom.com/share/763e480438c4481ba0aa056c6ef0cbbb?...
| bigdict wrote:
| This a political/economic system failure. How do we design a
| system that allows for entities like exercism to be
| funded/supported?
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| >Rust does not use a garbage collector, using advanced static
| analysis to provide deterministic drops instead.
|
| Huh?
| squigglydonut wrote:
| Surprised that a Pluralsight type company wouldn't acquire.
| shams93 wrote:
| What I did once in the very early 2000s was to white label a free
| platform so that other people could license the software from us
| for $$$ to pay for our free flsash game platform in 2001.
| Arcuru wrote:
| That's too bad.
|
| I used to contribute to Exercism a lot (I'm still technically a
| maintainer but haven't meaningfully helped in a while), I think
| it was the first OSS project I contributed a large amount of
| effort to. I was more or less the sole maintainer for C++ for a
| while and also helped with the C track.
|
| It's definitely a good service and OSS project, I recommend it a
| lot. Fundamentally though people don't want to pay for things
| that they can get for free, or they're used to getting for free.
|
| If people actually want OSS projects to survive, you should be
| giving a little bit of recurring money. I set aside $XX/month to
| distribute to projects and I don't even work anymore.
| jll29 wrote:
| My heart is in pain from reading this post - as everybody's who
| had a startup & encountered the "poor fit" argument. I
| particularly feel for you regarding the problem of being more
| generic than needed when people prefer smaller scope (happened to
| me a few times).
|
| I don't have a solution for you, and you probably tried a lot of
| prudent things. I assume you have already contacted people that
| buy into educational software (e.g. Kevin O'Leary of 'Shark Tank'
| fame)?
|
| I wish you some kind of miracle that turns things around;
| sometimes once conversation can change everything. Surely this
| user base deserves that the site finds a way to sustain.
| trcarney wrote:
| I just had an idea that is a shot in the dark but you could try
| cold calling large companies with complicated SDKs to see if they
| will pay you a large monthly fee in exchange for exercism hosting
| a tutorial they create for their SDK.
|
| You already have the sandbox and the support for the most popular
| languages.
|
| It may take some development to build out the feature but you
| probably wouldn't need too many to sign on to cover your costs
| and you could still leave your core offering free.
| primitivesuave wrote:
| This is a great idea, especially when you consider the untold
| millions that companies like Twilio and Stripe already spend on
| educating developers. Perhaps along with "language tracks"
| there could be "API tracks".
| cheema33 wrote:
| Like many others I had never heard of this service. I looked and
| I am very very impressed. The way topics are laid out... someone
| put a lot of thought into this.
|
| I would love for this site to continue and thrive.
|
| I also agree with some others here that the hosting at AWS is
| probably best left to organizations that have a lot of spare
| cash. It is way overpriced. I self host a fairly busy site. It is
| mostly hands-off. I have never really fully understood the AWS
| premium.
| ihid wrote:
| Hello. Blog post author and Exercism co-founder here.
|
| Thanks for all the comments, especially those kind supportive
| ones. I've replied to a few, but I thought it would making a
| couple of general points for context.
|
| 1. I feel something that's missed is that if Exercism just
| continues to help tens of thousands of people per month and has
| no-one working full-time on it in the future, that's not the end
| of the world. Our donations cover server costs (thank you,
| donors!) so there's not an existential threat. And our wonderful
| volunteers keep our content growing and up to date (we've added a
| dozen new languages already this year). For most of Exercism's
| existence, it has had no paid staff. Me and Erik having to become
| volunteers again is ok - it just means things will improve
| slower.
|
| The blog post was written as an update to our community, and our
| community has been on this journey with me over the last few
| year. They've seen us go from zero money, to raising over $1M in
| donations and hiring people, to not having follow-up donations
| and having to let those people go. They have a lot of context
| that's maybe not seen by people new to the story. The post is
| sad, because Erik, who's well loved is leaving, and because the
| last couple of years haven't financially gone in the direction
| we'd have liked it to. But the post is not me complaining.
|
| Exercism hasn't been financially successful during the last 18
| months, but it's fulfilled the core part of its mission by
| helping hundreds of thousands of people. And it will continue to
| help people moving forward.
|
| 2. Our aim is to get people to learn a programming language and
| then to get on with their lives. It's actively not to monetise
| people. That's important, because it changes the model a little.
| We don't expect people to stick around month-after-month doing
| stuff (one person said that having 70k MAU is terrible - but you
| can also see it as totally expected - you sign up, learn, leave -
| that's the point). Which means having some recurring Premium
| offering doesn't massively work. Nearly all the people who donate
| are also _contributors_ , power-learners (learning multiple
| languages), or people who feel aligned to a world where something
| like Exercism exists, and want to ensure it continues to do so.
|
| So the only real end-user model is to charge an upfront fee for
| using Exercism, which actively goes against the mission and
| doesn't honour the commitment under which people have
| contributed.
|
| 3. To all the other monetisation ideas, thank you for them. I
| appreciate you all wanting to help. We've considered and
| experimented with lots of them over the years. We've not found
| one that fits well yet but maybe/hopefully that'll change in the
| future. I have areas I will continue to peruse and am hopeful
| about.
|
| 4. There are numerous threads on server costs, and while I
| appreciate the opinions there, saving some cost there wouldn't
| massively shift the needle. Our donations cover our server costs.
| Hiring good developers and other people costs a lot more money
| than the ~$3k/month we'd save. I'd also say that there's some
| general under-appreciation of the complexity of running student's
| code in 73 programming language sandboxes in real-time. Exercism
| is a lot more complex than a webserver/database model - we have
| over 400 GitHub repos. I'm certain some ops gurus would be able
| to do a better job at building a server infrastructure than I've
| done for less money, but the one I've built works with basically
| zero maintenance and not having to be on call 24/7/365 is
| something I need/value.
|
| As I said in my blog post, I'm going to take a couple of weeks
| out now, and come back hopefully re-energised to keep building
| Exercism, and the new project alongside it, which hopefully will
| help keep Exercism funded. Thank you again for all the support,
| ideas and well-wishes.
|
| ---
|
| Changelog: - Added "For most of Exercism's existence..." to the
| end of that paragraph.
| dools wrote:
| > My plan is to give beginners a rock-solid base, then funnel
| them into Exercism
|
| Shouldn't you be doing this the other way?
|
| If you have 2 million users, then just make something that you
| can sell to them.
|
| Whenever you have a bunch of customers paying you $X there is a
| subset of those customers that will pay you $(X+Y).
|
| You don't have to "make them the product" in the sense that you
| would be selling their eyeballs, but you're teaching people to
| code, surely some of them will want to get a job as a coder
| afterwards.
|
| What about creating a paid placement program where you give
| recruiters at companies hungry for tech talent access to the
| coders that perform the best on some tests? The coders can
| voluntarily take the tests, so they know their info is going to
| recruiters.
|
| You could also offer certifications as a service to companies
| looking to test proficiency of their existing staff or create a
| subscription model for use by companies who want to upskill their
| existing staff.
|
| With 2m users surely you have people using it from all over the
| world. Companies might pay a premium to hire the best up and
| coming talent on Upwork because generally their hourly rates are
| not as high as experienced devs on the platform, but you can tell
| based on the code they're writing that, despite their relative
| inexperience, they're an outlier in terms of coding skill.
|
| You could get affiliate revenue or commissions by selling other,
| paid certifications such as for SAP/ABAP, Cisco, Microsoft and
| the like.
|
| It just seems like you can take this as the platform product and
| upsell, rather than trying to create another product that you
| sell to people who _aren 't_ already using Exercism.
| d3vmax wrote:
| Can you integrate commercially with a jobs board? Or create a
| jobs website?
| 8bithero wrote:
| I was doing some Exercism tasks the other day and then saw this
| so if only felt right that I make a donation. Looking at some of
| the comments there seems to be a number of people who have also
| just made a donation.
|
| Given the state of every service becoming subscription based, I
| can definitely see a lot of subscription fatigue. Maybe an
| alternative route you could try is the annual wikipedia "We want
| to keep this free. Please help us buy donating". I think a lot of
| people appreciate the service but a lot of the times it's easy to
| forget that running a service like exercism can get expensive,
| and would be willing to donate, given a compelling enough
| reminder of this.
| freedomben wrote:
| Personally, I think this approach of asking for donations is
| the right move for a non-profit. Subscription fatigue is real
| and is becoming a major problem. I am now at the point where I
| will go without software I would absolutely pay for one time,
| but because it is a subscription I refuse.
|
| I'm sure when all is said and done, there just are not enough
| people like me to make a difference, but I sure hope things
| swing the other way. Subscriptions for everything and tips for
| everything are two cultural things that need to die in a fire.
| They are ways of squeezing more out of people, especially by
| taking advantage of human tendencies. It's gross and at this
| point I think it is unethical. Maybe not all implementations,
| but there are plenty that are.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| You could use the time value of money formula to convert
| between one-time prices and subscriptions. just multiply
| annual price by 30 to get forever price.
|
| So my $6 per month VPS would be about $2,000 upfront.
|
| And a $500 game console would be a $1.50 monthly
| subscription. (Obviously glossing over tons of differences in
| say, a PS2 and a Stadia subscription)
|
| It feels easier to ask customers for $1 per month than $360
| up front... Especially since I don't know if my service will
| be up forever
| jamwil wrote:
| I don't think a perpetuity is correct in this case.
| Software depreciates rapidly without updates and the norm
| was to charge the one-time price for each major version,
| which was always somewhat analogous to a subscription
| assuming you wanted up-to-date software.
| nicbou wrote:
| Voluntary donations don't work. At least not for most things.
| The vast majority of users don't donate, and that includes the
| most demanding ones.
|
| I offer a ton of free information online. I received raving
| feedback from people, including some that said I saved them
| thousands of euros. Just this week readers jokingly suggested
| giving me a Nobel prize or a statue. Still, donations are one
| percent of my revenue on a good month. They would not cover my
| groceries.
|
| This is fine for me, but it's always on the back of my mind
| when people suggest donations as a funding method.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I'm assuming that you are talking about "All About Berlin"?
| (I am deliberately not linking, because you didn't, and there
| is probably a reason for that).
|
| I run a number of apps and services that don't make a dime.
| In fact, they cost me thousands. I don't mind.
|
| Monetization is a real pain in the ass, and I stay away from
| it (for these services).
|
| I have the ability to make a lot of money, if I choose, but
| that's not much fun. I don't really need the money, and I
| like having full control of everything I do.
|
| I am regularly approached by folks with monetization ideas.
| Some, are quite good. Others ... _not so much_ ...
|
| Maybe I 'll pursue something, eventually, but I'm in no
| hurry.
|
| Thanks for your service. Looks like a great site.
| nicbou wrote:
| I agree that monetisation is a pain. It's the least
| favourite part of my job because it takes focus away from
| providing value to my readers. I don't like putting my
| business hat on.
|
| On the other hand, it allows me to work on what I love full
| time. This would not be possible if I relied on user
| donations or even public funding.
| 127 wrote:
| In my experience asking for donations generates about 1000x
| less money (within that exact order of magnitude) than directly
| asking for money up front until you get access to the product.
| tensor wrote:
| Subscriptions are a pain for sure, but I think a big reason for
| that is that they are always something like $10-20 a month. For
| something that people might only use occasionally that's just
| too much. If they were instead maybe $20 a year and easy to
| cancel, I think a lot of people would sign up.
| dboreham wrote:
| I haven't used this site but I did run a service a while ago that
| had 100K free users. All the talk here about not using AWS is
| bunk. Not needle moving. OP needs to bite the bullet and charge
| their customers. At least some of them, for something. Heck some
| of their traffic probably comes from bots. Bill them. Make a
| white label version and try to sell that to big customers.
| Actually the other way round: try to sell it then make it if they
| bite.
| game_the0ry wrote:
| I have a theory that developers are a difficult demographic to
| market to and monetize off of.
|
| Its bc we are skeptical and frugal.
| mistyvales wrote:
| I was donating, but my skill level is not good enough to
| successfully use the site. It's not really a place for beginners
| though, so once I learn more I will probably sign back up
| cj wrote:
| My marketing department this week asked for my approval to spend
| $50k placing our logo in an IT newsletter with 300k subscribers.
|
| If you have an email list of 2 million... a lot of companies will
| pay $50-100k for a mention.
| arbuge wrote:
| > The one area we have had some promising success is in
| advertising on the site. But the effort it takes to find
| advertisers and manage them, and my general desire not to flood
| Exercism with adverts, has meant that I feel this isn't a very
| sustainable strategy.
|
| To me that begs the obvious question... what about trying some
| automated advertising like Google Ads? Probably not the most
| theoretically optimum use of their ad space, but minimal effort
| is involved.
| ysofunny wrote:
| so basically letting google be their business???
| ysofunny wrote:
| capitalism doesn't really play well with digital assets,
| services, nor anything digital really.
|
| we need a lot more Byung-Chul-Han somehow
| hankchinaski wrote:
| why not charge for access? There is plenty of people making money
| with subscriptions and courses in this space. You just need to
| gate the content. You have an audience already, bait and switch.
| Money will come.
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