[HN Gopher] Running an open source app: Usage, costs and communi...
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Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations
Author : scastiel
Score : 135 points
Date : 2024-10-18 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spliit.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (spliit.app)
| Dachande663 wrote:
| I love the idea of this but, given the traffic numbers, this
| could run on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet and have the same result.
| They've burnt over a grand just to use vercel. Maybe I'm just
| older but I don't understand the logic here. A basic VPS, setup
| once, would have the same result and would be neutral in cost
| (it's how I run my own little free apps). Maybe the author is
| lucky enough that $100/mo doesn't really affect them or they're
| happy for it to pay for the convenience (my assumption).
| scastiel wrote:
| Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital
| Ocean droplet? I'd be very curious to see that ;)
|
| The web hosting costs basically nothing. Most of the cost comes
| from the database.
| diggan wrote:
| > Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital
| Ocean droplet?
|
| How many times per second is the DB actually accessed? As far
| as I can tell my the metrics, they're doing ~1.7
| requests/minute, you'll have a hard time finding a DB that
| couldn't handle that.
|
| In fact, I'd bet you'd be able to host that website (the
| database) in a text file on disk without any performance
| issues whatsoever.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| 6k visits per week * 5 page views per visit is one view per
| 20 seconds on average. Even very modest hardware with naively
| written application code should have no problem handling
| thousands of CRUD database queries per second (assuming every
| query doesn't need a table scan or something).
|
| Modern computers are mind-bogglingly powerful. An old laptop
| off eBay can probably handle the load for business needs for
| all but the very largest corporations.
| npsomaratna wrote:
| My understanding is that DO VPS' are underpowered (as are
| VPS offerings from most other VPS vendors). Dollar for
| dollar, bare metal stuff from Hetzner, OVH, etc are far
| more powerful.
|
| That said, I completely agree-a $4/month DO VPS can run
| MySQL, and should easily handle this load; in fact I've
| handled far bigger loads in practice.
|
| On a tangent: any recommendations for good US-based bare
| metal providers (with a convenience factor comparable to
| OVH, etc)?
| diggan wrote:
| > good US-based bare metal providers
|
| The times I've needed it, DataPacket (not based in US,
| but has servers in the US) and Vultr (based in the US)
| have both been good to me.
| npsomaratna wrote:
| Thank you so much. I'll take a look at these.
| mminer237 wrote:
| In a trademark travesty, I must ask DataPacket.com or
| DataPacket.net?
| diggan wrote:
| Sorry, I was referring to datapacket.com
| mxuribe wrote:
| Hetzner is of course not U.S. based, but has expanded to
| have 2 U.S. sites (Oregon i think, and Virginia)....so
| that could be an option maybe. Caveat: i have not
| leveraged Hetzner in the U.s.....so can not speak to
| their quality.
| npsomaratna wrote:
| That's news thank you. I'll check this out.
| mxuribe wrote:
| Uh, actually at a quick glance, seems the U.s. sites are
| more for their cloud offering and maybe not bare metal
| servers.....i think (sadly):
| https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
| horsawlarway wrote:
| So many people don't seem to understand how efficient
| modern machines are.
|
| As someone who is literally using old laptops to host
| things from my basement on my consumer line (personal, non-
| commercial) and a business line (commercial)...
|
| I can host this for under 50 bucks a year, including the
| domain and power costs, and accounting for offsite backup
| of the data.
|
| I wish people understood just how much the "cloud" is
| making in pure profit. If you're already a software dev...
| you can absolutely manage the complexity of hosting things
| yourself for FAR cheaper. You won't get five 9s of
| reliability (not that you're getting that from any major
| cloud vendor anyways without paying through the nose and a
| real SLA) but a small UPS will easily get you to 99% uptime
| - which is absolutely fine for something like this.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| The problem is that my coworkers are morons who seem
| incapable of remembering to run a simple `explain
| analyze` on their queries. They'd rather just write
| monstrosities that kindasorta work without giving a
| single damn about performance.
|
| It seems like computers are getting more capable, but
| developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same
| pace.
| 9dev wrote:
| > It seems like computers are getting more capable, but
| developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same
| pace.
|
| And that makes perfect sense. Why should humans
| inconvenience themselves to please the machine? If
| anyone's at fault, it's the database for not being smart
| enough to optimize the query on its own.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| Oh man. Guess you're one of _those_. If you 're too lazy
| to do your job then maybe look into other lines of work.
| Or go work on database systems to create that magical
| optimizing query engine you think should exist.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| At my last job, we had architects pushing to make
| everything into microservices despite how absolutely
| horrible that idea is for performance and scalability
| (and understanding and maintainability and operations and
| ability for developers to actually run/test the code).
| The database can't do anything to help you when you split
| your queries onto different db instances on different VMs
| for no reason.
|
| I heard we had a 7 figure annual compute spend, and IIRC
| we only had a few hundred requests per second peak plus
| some batch jobs for a few million accounts. A single $160
| N100 minipc could probably handle the workload with
| better reliability than we had if we hadn't gone down
| that particular road to insanity.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| > ... microservices despite how absolutely horrible that
| idea is for performance and scalability
|
| Heh, remind me of a discussion I had with a coworker
| roughly 6 month ago. I tried to explain to them that the
| ability to scale each microservices separately almost
| never improves the actual performance of the platform as
| a whole - after all, you still need to have network calls
| between each service and could've also just started the
| monolith twice. And that would've most likely even needed
| less RAM too, even if each instance will likely consume
| more - after all, you now need less applications running
| to serve the same request.
|
| This discussion took place in the context of a b2e saas
| platform with _very_ moderate usage, almost everything
| being plain CRUD. Like 10-15k simultaneous users making
| data entries etc.
|
| I'm always unsure how I should feel after such
| discussions. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure he probably
| thinks that I'm dumb for not getting microservices. On
| the other hand... Well... ( kep kep )
| tbrownaw wrote:
| > _It seems like computers are getting more capable, but
| developers are becoming less capable at roughly the same
| pace._
|
| "Andy giveth, and Bill taketh away."
|
| Computers keep getting faster (personified as Andy Grove,
| from Intel), and software keeps getting slower (Bill
| Gates, from Microsoft).
| immibis wrote:
| As DHH said somewhere, it's incredible that the modern
| cloud stack has managed to get PROGRAMMERS to be scared
| of COMPUTERS. Seriously, what's with that? That shouldn't
| even be possible?
|
| If you can understand programming, you can understand
| Linux. Might take a while to be really confident, but do
| you need incredible confidence when you have backups? :)
| GreenWatermelon wrote:
| Not just somewhere, but in Rails World 2024 Opening
| keynote, and it was absolutely hilarious!
|
| Especially with that meme he showed about vercel is laws
| +500% markup lmaoo
|
| Don't be afraid of computers, don't be the pink elephant!
| tmpz22 wrote:
| You're right but I'll play devil's advocate for teaching
| purposes:
|
| * Usage won't be uniformly distributed and you may need to
| deal with burst traffic for example when a new version is
| released and all your users are pulling new config data.
|
| * Your application data may be very important to your users
| and keeping it on a single server is a significant risk.
|
| * You're users may be geographically distributed such that
| a user on the other side of the world may have a severely
| degraded experience.
|
| * Not all traffic is created equal and, especially paired
| with burst traffic, could have one expensive operation like
| heavy analytical query from one user cause timeouts for
| another user.
|
| Vercel does not solve all of these problems, but they are
| problems that may be exasperated by a $4 droplet.
|
| All said I still highly encourage developers to not sell
| their soul to a SaaS product that could care less about
| them and their use case and consider minimal infrastructure
| and complexity in order to have more success with their
| projects.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| * that's just static files. Even a $4 droplets will
| hardly ever get into issues serving that, even with
| hundreds of simultaneous requests.
|
| * Okay, I guess that means we should use 2? So that's $8
| now.
|
| * Vercel really doesn't help you there beyond serving
| static files from cdn. That hardly matters at this scale,
| you should keep in mind that you "only" add about 100ms
| of latency by serving from the other side of the globe.
| While that has an impact, it's not really _that_ much.
| And you can always use another cdn too. They 're very
| often free for html/js/css
|
| * Burst traffic is an issue, especially trolls that just
| randomly DOS your public servers for shits and giggles.
| That's pretty much the only one vercel actually helps you
| against. But so would others, they're not the only ones
| providing that service, and most do it for free.
|
| Frankly, the only real and valid reason is the previously
| mentioned: they've likely got the money and don't mind
| spending it for the ecosystem. And if they like it... Who
| are we to interfere? Aside from pointing out how
| massively they're overpaying, but they've gotta be able
| to handle that if they're willing to publish an article
| like this
| Quothling wrote:
| Is this really playing the devil's advocate though? I
| know this is a simplification but Stack Overflow launched
| on a couple of IIS servers and rode their exponential
| growth rather well. Sure they added more than "a couple"
| of web servers and improved their SQL server quite a bit,
| but as far as I recall they didn't even shift to CDN
| until five or six years after they grew. Eventually they
| moved into the cloud, but Spliit doesn't even have a
| fraction of the traffic SO did in its early days. As such
| I don't think any of the challenges you mention are all
| that relevant in the context aside from having backup.
| Perhaps also some redundancy by having two $4 droplets?
|
| Is the author even getting paid for their services
| though? If they aren't then why would they care? I don't
| mean that as rude as it sounds, but why would they pay
| that much money so people can use their product for free?
| fs0c13ty00 wrote:
| My open source service, lrclib.net, handles approximately 200
| requests per second at peak (yes you read that right, it's
| approximately 12000 requests per minute) on a simple EUR13
| Hetzner cloud server (4 AMD based VCPU, 8GB RAM). I'd love to
| write a blog post about how I made it possible sometime in
| the future, but basically, I cheated by using Rust together
| with SQLite3 and some caching.
|
| I was surprised by the cost of Vercel in that blog post too,
| which is why I dislike all kinds of serverless/lambda/managed
| services. For me, having a dozen people subscribing to
| $1-$2/month sponsorship on GitHub Sponsors is enough to cover
| all the costs. Even if no one donates, I'd still have no
| trouble keeping the project running on my own.
| Dachande663 wrote:
| I didn't mean it quite so insultingly, but yes, even a very
| modest server would handle that kind of load easily. You're
| not particularly high throughput (a few requests per second?)
| and I imagine the database is fairly efficient (you're not
| storing pages of text or binary blobs). I think you'd be
| pleasently surprised by what a little VPS can do.
| explain wrote:
| Running the 800th most popular website in the world (25-50M
| pageviews per day) on a 1GB VPS (Spring Boot, MariaDB, Redis)
|
| Very possible.
| avree wrote:
| It's surprising that you ask for advice on this topic in your
| blog, but then are very dismissive (complete with sarcastic
| wink) to the advice?
| codazoda wrote:
| I think it would be fine. I run a little private analytics
| service for my own websites. That service isn't as busy but
| handles ~11k requests per month. It logs to a SQLite
| database. It does this on a little Raspberry Pi 400 in my
| home office and it's not too busy. The CPU sits at 1% to 3%
| on average. Obviously there are a lot of differences in my
| setup but I would think you could handle 10x the traffic with
| a small VPS without any trouble at all.
|
| You can read a little bit more about my analytics setup here:
|
| https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-
| pi-4...
| klabb3 wrote:
| You could run it on Cloudflare workers for free with plenty
| to spare. You get 5M reads/100k writes per _day_ on D1.
|
| OTOH If you want managed Postgres it seems like you always
| have to pay a fairy high minimum.
| bdlowery wrote:
| https://f5bot.com/ was free for like 8 years and it processed
| hundreds of thousands of db records a day, and it barely cost
| anything.
| trollied wrote:
| "that many times". It's nearly zero traffic.
| diggan wrote:
| Do I read something wrong, or does the stats amount to ~400 daily
| visitors with ~2500 page views per day? That's about ~1.7
| requests per minute... And they pay $115/month for this?
|
| I'm 99% sure I'm reading something wrong, as that's incredible
| expensive unless this is hosting LLM models or something similar,
| but it seems like it's a website for sharing expenses?
| roflmaostc wrote:
| Yeah, I'm confused too. Running some sort of VPS would totally
| do the job, no?
| diggan wrote:
| I'm fairly sure you could host this on a last-gen Raspberry
| PI at home, if you live close to where your users are :)
| Aachen wrote:
| Definitely don't need a last gen. Someone else did the math
| upthread and came to one request every 20 seconds, which if
| you factor in burstiness and that if you have a
| particularly bad burst that slows down the system a little,
| the next request will take even longer etc. (ask me how I
| learned that lesson), it's probably good to budget for it
| handling multiple requests per second. For this
| application, my understanding is you've got a handful of
| people in your group that you're splitting a couple of
| expenses with, so data processing is small beans and
| that'll definitely run on a first gen Pi if you optimise it
| properly, or perhaps a 2nd-3rd gen if you don't want to
| spend the time
| Vegenoid wrote:
| I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new
| generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a
| scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option for
| any web app.
|
| A more charitable reading is that they pick the technologies
| that the jobs they want are hiring for, even if they don't make
| sense for this simple application.
| diggan wrote:
| > I think this is just the natural conclusion of the new
| generation of devs being raised in the cloud and picking a
| scalable serverless PaaS like Vercel as the default option
| for any web app.
|
| I'm not sure, I'm also "new generation of devs" I suppose,
| cloud had just entered the beginning of the hype cycle when I
| started out professionally. Most companies/individuals at
| that point were pushing for "everything cloud" but after
| experiencing how expensive it really is, you start to look
| around for alternatives.
|
| I feel like that's just trying to have a "engineering
| mindset" rather than what generation you belong to.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Certainly, I just mean that we are hitting a point where
| there can be professional devs, with multiple years of
| experience at tech companies successfully building
| software, who have only ever known and worked with a PaaS
| to deploy an app.
| consteval wrote:
| It's frustrating too because deployment technologies and
| tools continue to get better and better. It's never been
| easier to deploy an application + database to some
| arbitrary computer. You can do it declaratively, no SSH,
| no random shell scripts, no suspicious fiddling.
|
| Also, sidenote: but for small stuff you can just deploy
| in your home. I've done it before. It's really not that
| scary, and odds are you have a computer laying around.
| The only "spooky" part is relying on my ISP router. I
| don't trust that thing, but that can be fixed.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...after experiencing how expensive it really is, you
| start to look around for alternatives...
|
| One would think that to be the common sense case...but, in
| corporate America - at least the last handful of companies
| that i worked at - some companies are *only now just
| getting work loads up to the cloud now*...so they have not
| yet felt the cost pain....Or, in other cases, other firms
| are living in the cloud, have seen the exorbitant costs,
| but move waaaaay toooo sloooow to migrate workloads off
| cloud (or hybridize them in smart ways for their
| business)....Or, in even other cases that i have seen,
| instead of properly analyzing function and costs of cloud
| usage - and truly applying an engineering mindset to
| matters - some of these so called IT leaders (who are too
| busy with powerpoint slides) will simply layoff people and
| "achieve savings" that way.
|
| Welcome to being a technologist employed at one of
| several/many American corporations in 2024!
| x0x0 wrote:
| Or they're optimizing for not being a sysadmin, which some
| people can't do and even some of the people who can find to
| be very ungratifying work. For a project that runs on this
| person's enthusiasm, that seems not crazy.
|
| It's certainly possible to spin up your own db backup
| scripts, monitor that, make sure it gets offsite to an s3
| bucket or something, set yourself a calendar reminder to test
| that all once a month, etc... but if I had to write out a
| list of things that I enjoy doing and a list of things that I
| don't, that work would feature heavily on the "yeah, but no"
| list.
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Yes, if you don't want to do that work and are happy to pay
| someone else to take care of it, then that is great. But if
| you like making free web apps, relying on a PaaS will get
| expensive.
| immibis wrote:
| If you become a sysadmin, not only do you save $100 per
| month but you can also add it to your CV.
|
| DHH (Rails founder) thinks you should dare to connect a
| server to the internet: https://world.hey.com/dhh/dare-to-
| connect-a-server-to-the-in...
|
| (I already submitted this once, but given the discussion
| here, I think it's worth posting again, if my rate limit
| allows it)
| ryandrake wrote:
| > The merchants of complexity thrive when they can scare
| you into believing that even the simplest things are too
| dangerous to even attempt by yourself these days.
|
| Awesome first sentence! I know I'm going to agree with
| the article just by that. This applies to so many things
| in life, too. We're been taught that so many things
| people routinely did in the past are now scary and
| impossible.
| x0x0 wrote:
| > you can also add it to your CV
|
| That can backfire and give an employer the idea you want
| to do that work though. I not only hate it, but nobody
| gives a damn until stuff breaks and then everyone is mad.
| You rarely get rewarded for stuff silently sitting there
| and working.
|
| edit: to be clear, I think doing it yourself once is
| great experience. And I've run small web apps on a single
| server, all the way from supervisord -> nginx ->
| passenger -> rails with pg and redis. I'd rather build
| features or work on marketing.
| joshdavham wrote:
| > new generation of devs being raised in the cloud
|
| I unfortunately sorta put myself in this category where my
| PaaS of choice is Firebase. For this cost-splitting app
| however, what would you personally recommend if not Vercel?
| Would you recommend something like a Digital Ocean Droplet or
| something else? What are the best alternatives in your
| opinion?
| Vegenoid wrote:
| Yes, I believe a Droplet or VPS (virtual private server)
| from some other provider would be sufficient. Digital Ocean
| isn't the cheapest, but it's pretty frictionless, slick,
| and has a lot of good tutorial articles about setting up
| servers.
|
| You'd have a Linux machine (the VPS) that would have at
| least 3 programs running (or it is running Docker, with
| these programs running inside containers):
|
| - Node.js
|
| - the database (likely MySQL or PostgreSQL)
|
| - Nginx or Apache
|
| You'd set up a DNS record pointing your domain at the VPS's
| IP address. When someone visits your website, their HTTP
| requests will be routed to port 80 or 443 on the VPS. Nginx
| will be listening on those ports, and forward (aka proxy)
| the requests to Node, which will respond back to Nginx,
| which will then send the response back to the user.
|
| There are of course security and availability concerns that
| are now your responsibility to handle and configure
| correctly in order to reach the same level of security and
| availability provided by a good PaaS. That's what you're
| paying the PaaS for. However, it is not too difficult to
| reach a level of security and availability that is more
| than sufficient for a small, free web app such as this one.
| maccard wrote:
| I don't think that the difference is $110/month, but
| surely reading that you realise there's a lot more going
| on there than "point vercel at a git repo and you're
| done". I don't know how long it would take me to install
| docker and configure the above, but it's certainly a few
| hours. I tried vercel for the first time a few weeks ago,
| and I had a production ready site online with a custom
| domain in about 5 minutes.
|
| I've commented here before that on AWS (which I'm fairly
| familiar with) I could set up ECS with a load balancer
| and have a simple web app with rds running in about 30
| minutes, and literally never have to touch the infra
| again.
| tempfile wrote:
| So _that 's_ how vercel makes their money.
| skwee357 wrote:
| That's, and a bunch of twitter "indie hackers" who get traffic
| spikes that result in hundreds of dollars bills. Seriously,
| just get a VPS
| rozap wrote:
| Their marketing team needs a raise.
| valevk wrote:
| Would be interesting to see how this compares to
| https://splid.app/
| nacs wrote:
| Well this is opensource for one.
| rikafurude21 wrote:
| For reference, 100 dollars a month gets you this bare metal
| server on hetzner: Intel(r) Core(tm) i9-13900, 64 GB DDR5 ECC, 2
| x 1.92 TB
|
| ... Should be more than enough to handle 2 requests per minute,
| could probably handle 100x of that.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| My i5-6600k at home can handle ~15k requests per _second_ for a
| toy social media app with postgresql assembling the xml to send
| to the client (though I 've done some batching optimization and
| used rust for my application server to hit that). Passmark
| cpubenchmark suggests a 13900 should be 6-8x more capable than
| that.
|
| So it should be able to handle somewhere in the ballpark of
| 2,000,000x the required load, or maybe 100,000x without the
| application level optimization.
|
| (TLS reduces this by a factor of ~10 if you're doing handshakes
| each time. Despite what blogs claim, as far as I can tell, if
| your CPU doesn't have QAT, TLS is very expensive)
| wongarsu wrote:
| If you're on Hetzner you can get a load balancer with TLS
| termination for $5/month. It's hidden in the cloud category
| but fully supports dedicated servers.
|
| Of course doing SSL on the server itself is more secure, but
| if that's a performance bottleneck the load balancer can be a
| cost effective compromise
| kkielhofner wrote:
| Yes Cloudflare and all of that but they'll do it for free.
|
| Then you get to determine gains you may get from caching
| and other potential optimizations from one of the best
| eyeball connected providers in the world. Oh plus the
| ability to fend off the largest DDoS attacks ever seen.
|
| Cloudflare tunnels enable you to do all of this through an
| encrypted tunnel without exposing the machine/services to
| the internet at all. Cloudflare will still MITM all traffic
| but so does Hetzner (obviously). At least with the tunnel
| the connection is persistent so you don't incur TLS
| handshaking, etc CPU overhead with each client connection.
|
| Bonus points - you can move hosting providers without any
| hassle, configure hosting provider redundancy (Hetzner +
| whoever), all of that stuff.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Yet another testimony to how utterly few people are willing to
| pay for what they use in the abuse system called "open source".
| People, start charging for your work, and leave the freeloaders
| behind!
|
| > A short disclaimer: I don't need donations to make Spliit work.
| I am lucky enough to have a full-time job that pays me enough to
| live comfortably and I am happy to give some of the money I earn
| to the community.
|
| And this is why open source will finally die, because being
| comfortably employed while still having surplus time and energy
| to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among the younger
| generations.
|
| A better way to "give back to the community", instead of making
| open source software, would be to purchase software from other
| indie developers.
| jampekka wrote:
| If anything is dying it's proprietary software. Which is great
| for all of us because open source is vastly more efficient
| system.
| aniviacat wrote:
| > People, start charging for your work, and leave the
| freeloaders behind!
|
| We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have empirical
| evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like open source
| (for their primary products).
|
| > being comfortably employed while still having surplus time
| and energy to work for free is an increasingly rare thing among
| the younger generations.
|
| edit: remved anecdote
|
| The cost of living will never rise so much that the upper 50%
| can't easily make enough money. (Otherwise what? The other 150
| million people go homeless?)
|
| And unless our industry sees a major shift, which I don't see
| happening, software engineers will continue being comfortably
| in the upper 50%.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > We already have a profit-oriented market. And we have
| empirical evidence that profit-oriented markets do not like
| open source (for their primary products).
|
| That's a given. If you open source your code, other
| developers will steal it and sell your software. Just like
| billion dollar tech companies are the main benefiters of open
| source today, that some guy made for free. Excuse me, I meant
| for $42 in donations.
| aniviacat wrote:
| When I write open source libraries I consider the ones
| benefitting to be the general public.
|
| Even if my libraries were used only by mega corporations
| (which they aren't) there would still be a benefit to the
| public: If companies have lower cost, they will charge
| lower prices, benefitting customers / the general public.
| (And yes, they will lower prices. Most markets are not
| monopolies.)
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Open source never benefits the general public, because
| open source developers never make a product polished and
| user-friendly enough to be usable by the general public.
|
| Instead, open source mainly benefits other developers.
| But at the end of the chain there has to be a product
| that is of use for non-developers. Because developing
| isn't for developments sake. And the person who makes
| that product reaps all the monetary benefits from the
| work that the others have made.
|
| If FOSS people made complete products which were end user
| friendly, I'd buy the argument of benefitting the general
| public.
| aniviacat wrote:
| > developing isn't for developments sake.
|
| [citation needed]
|
| > the person who makes that product reaps all the
| monetary benefits from the work that the others have made
|
| Which means that they can offer their product for a lower
| price, which then benefits the general public.
|
| Companies being able to operate cheaper / more
| efficiently _does_ benefit the general public, as long as
| the market isn 't a monopoly. And as per my above
| comment, most markets are not monopolies.
|
| > open source developers never make a product polished
| and user-friendly enough to be usable by the general
| public
|
| I've been using Audacity, Gimp, Inkscape, uBlock Origin,
| and many others long before I knew what FOSS means.
| Spliit is also pretty cool ;)
| immibis wrote:
| That's why I make all my software AGPL now.
|
| I haven't published any software at all recently. But if I
| did (anything non-trivial), it would be AGPL. Or even SSPL.
|
| Permissive licensing (MIT, BSD, Unlicense, public domain,
| etc) is a scam to make you work for companies for free - if
| your software is worth anything to them, that is. They told
| developers they should use MIT licenses so more people
| would use their software. That's true. They didn't ask
| whether that was a good thing.
| samatman wrote:
| If you don't want to give away software, and it sounds
| like you don't, then. Don't.
|
| Perhaps you're under the impression that I blindly click
| the button for a permissive license? No. I read it first.
| I know what it allows. That's why I choose it.
|
| I think it's nice when companies make money, for the
| record. Pays for houses, puts food on the table, sends
| kids to summer camp and college. Some of them even make a
| lot of money. That's fine too.
|
| If they want to use my software in the process, more
| power to them. That's why I put my name next to the
| copyright notice, on a license which says in plain
| English that they can do that.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| To be fair they're not heavily soliciting donations, and even
| actively say that they don't need them. So it's not surprising
| people don't prioritise giving anything. Many users probably
| haven't even thought of it
| renewiltord wrote:
| Are you the guy with the https://osspledge.com/ billboards
| around San Francisco? Haha. They're funny. I enjoyed the art.
| If it's actually you, I'd be curious who the illustrator is or
| if you used generative AI.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I'm not that guy, I'm against open source and free loading.
| Why would multi million dollar CEOs give anything to FOSS
| programmers when they're developing their crucial
| infrastructure for free?
|
| Work for free for huge companies so they can make billion
| dollar profits while at the same time demanding unionization.
| Refusing to sell your work to consumers who are willing to
| pay, yet happy to provide free tech support to free loaders
| who wouldn't give you a cent. What's the logic?
| quesera wrote:
| > _What 's the logic?_
|
| Some of us like making things, and are happy to share our
| excess production with the world.
|
| Like any other good work, it does not require
| acknowledgement or reciprocation, and the benefits are not
| part of a zero-sum economy where the giver is harmed by any
| action of the receiver.
|
| You're on record as being vehemently anti-OSS. Why does it
| offend you so much that other people prioritize forms of
| compensation differently than you do?
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > You're on record as being vehemently anti-OSS.
|
| That's true, I'm the chief anti-OSS crusader on HN and
| online. I'll give it a rest after this thread, to breathe
| and give all a chance to recover strength.
|
| > Some of us like making things, and are happy to share
| our excess production with the world.
|
| Selling those things is still sharing with the world.
| Most paid software is cheap to purchase.
|
| If FOSS was an eco system where end users had the
| common(?) courtesy to donate just a little bit to at
| least one of the projects they use, then I'd have nothing
| to say. But whenever I use any FOSS code and donate, I
| usually find myself alone with two or three other people
| who have donated.
|
| Unlike most other professions, programming is something
| most people start with as a hobby in young years. So
| maybe they don't value their own hard work and effort,
| even though they've matured past the young hobbyist
| phase? And then they get misguided by open source
| activists to labour for free.
|
| A young artist who publishes their songs online for free
| in the hopes of becoming famous, will still retain
| copyright on those works. No record label can come around
| and start selling those songs without even letting the
| artist know. Much less stealing and selling the songs of
| a well-established artist if he/she decides to release
| music for free.
|
| I just don't like free loading, and I don't like enablers
| either.
| quesera wrote:
| Selling a thing comes with greater obligations than
| giving it away.
|
| I am unwilling to accept those obligations, in most
| cases.
|
| I am, however, perfectly happy to share some of the work
| that I do back into an ecosystem which I have benefited
| from. I also volunteer for organizations I care about,
| and I pick up litter in public parks. :)
|
| I do not believe that I am being exploited. The Internet
| is and always has been built on open source -- and as bad
| as the Internet is, it would be worse if it didn't exist
| or if it was a proprietary network.
|
| I think you're taking a real problem (funding of valuable
| work) and exploding it into an argument against open
| source, which just doesn't follow for me.
|
| I do 100% support finding a way to monetarily compensate
| people who do valuable work and contribute it to the
| world. Theoretically. Practically, it gets messy real
| quickly and I don't see a good broad solution.
| lccerina wrote:
| "Open source will finally die" said on a website likely running
| on some linux-based server, with some JS frontend, some open
| source/commercially licensed DB, and communicating with
| protocols regulated by a non-profit organization. Also in the
| future maybe reading this page from a device using a RISC-V
| processor. Sure.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| I hope it brings a tear of joy to the corner of the eyes of
| those selfless FOSS programmers that they've done their share
| to help Y Combinator be worth $600 000 000 000. That money is
| surely better spent on people who deserve it better.
| trevor-e wrote:
| I've been going down the VPS rabbit hole lately since I have some
| toy projects I want to host and really don't like the
| unpredictable pricing model of these "pay as you go" providers
| like Vercel. E.g. I really love Supabase but it's hard to justify
| jumping straight to the $25/month plan in combination with Vercel
| costs.
|
| I was surprised how extremely easy it is to get set up with
| Coolify on a Hetzner VPS, which has preset install options for
| NextJS + Supabase + Posthog + many others. And I get the standard
| autodeploy on commit functionality. The open-source versions are
| missing some features, and I don't get the slick Vercel admin
| interface, but for a pet project it works great. I'm also by no
| means a sysadmin expert, but with ChatGPT it's pretty easy to
| figure things out now.
| pentagrama wrote:
| I tested the app and found it awesome that it doesn't require
| account creation! You just get a private link, share it with the
| group, and when they open the link, it asks who they are to 'log
| in' as themselves. Of course, users could game the system by
| logging in as other members, but I think it's a compromise the
| developer made, knowing the user base and how frictionless it
| makes the user experience. Neat.
| culi wrote:
| I've used this really neat website called when2meet[0] for
| community organizing heavily. You make an event, get a url and
| share it. Users choose their name and they can even add a
| completely optional password to prevent impersonation
|
| I'm heavily inspired by it and working on an app for book clubs
| to host "elections" to choose their next book to read using a
| variety of voting systems (ranked choice, approval, scored,
| first past the post, etc).
|
| [0] https://www.when2meet.com/
| itsthejb wrote:
| kittysplit.com has had this feature set for a decade. I try to
| promote it whenever I can
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is cool, dude. Thank you for sharing. Irrespective of the
| actual numbers I'm always curious how people fund projects like
| this.
|
| One thing I've been interested in is the idea of decentralized
| handling for this. That is, the project is funded in and every
| month if its bills don't get paid it dies. If it receives enough
| to go over it buys T-bonds for the appropriate duration and then
| burns them down over time.
|
| Perhaps in the past it would have to be automated but I wonder if
| in the near future a limited AI agent could be the server and you
| leave him alone to do his thing.
| anticorporate wrote:
| Not to be "that guy" but...
|
| To clarify some confusion in this thread, it might be helpful to
| distinguish "open source" (the application) from "free" (this
| hosted instance of the application). Munging the two together
| might lead to some incorrect conclusions. Running a "free"
| application for others is going to have certain costs. The cost
| of running an "open source" application is going to depend
| entirely on the resources that application consumes, which, if
| run privately, might be a lot less.
| weinzierl wrote:
| The pay only what you use model is nice when your revenue also
| scales with use. For my projects I wish there were plans with
| higher fixed cost and risk only in availability and not in cost.
| sam0x17 wrote:
| The only downside with that I've found is people and orgs tend
| to overestimate their future usage of X across the board, so
| profits rarely match expectations with pay-as-you-go, and tier-
| based pricing will easily overcome you by capturing more $$
| from the market. Some notable exceptions are things like file
| storage where people tend to underestimate what they will need
| I find.
| mherrmann wrote:
| Re your question on saving costs: If you run it on a single Linux
| VPS, then I suspect you can get the costs down to 5-10$ per
| month.
|
| One thing I find interesting is the growth chart: It's linear.
| But given that the app clearly has some traction, and is viral in
| nature, how come it isn't exponential?
| JamesonNetworks wrote:
| Best I've been able to do is around $22 a month on DO, would
| love to hear alternatives that are cheaper
| misiek08 wrote:
| Hetzner my lord :)
| moffkalast wrote:
| Pi 5 + Cloudflare
| LVB wrote:
| I'm always curious what folks use for their database for things
| like this. Even though I like SQLite--a lot--my preference has
| become that the app is generally separate and mostly stateless.
| Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I like
| being able to expand/replace/trash the app infra at will with no
| worries.
|
| Thought about maybe running a Postgres VPS, but I've enjoyed
| using neon.tech more than I expected (esp. the GUI and
| branching). I guess the thing that has crept in: speed/ease is
| really beating out my ingrained cheapness as I've gotten older
| and have less time. A SaaS DB has sped things up. Still don't
| like the monthly bills & variability though.
| mtlynch wrote:
| > _Almost always the data is the most important thing, so I
| like being able to expand /replace/trash the app infra at will
| with no worries._
|
| Have you used SQLite with Litestream? That's the beauty of it.
| You can blow away the app and deploy it somewhere else, and
| Litestream will just pull down your data and continue along as
| if nothing happened.
|
| At the top of this post, I show a demo of attaching Litestream
| to my app, and then blowing away my Heroku instance and
| redeploying a clean instance on Fly.io, and Litestream ports
| all the data along with the new deployment:
|
| https://mtlynch.io/litestream/
| LVB wrote:
| I'm currently using SQLite + Litestream with one app, though
| it's strictly Litestream as a backup/safety net and I'd be
| manually standing the thing back up if it came to building
| the server anew, as that's not automated.
|
| If anything, I'd probably end up looking at a dedicated PG
| VPS. I've started to get used to a few Postgres conveniences
| over SQLite, especially around datetimes, various extensions,
| and more sophisticated table alterations (without that
| infamous SQLite 12-step process), etc. So that's been an
| evolution, too, compared to my always-SQLite days.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| > No, my app never talks to a remote database server.
|
| > It's a simple, open-source tool that replicates a SQLite
| database to Amazon's S3 cloud storage.
|
| That was a very long walk to get to that second quote. And it
| makes the first quote feel deceptive.
| rkwz wrote:
| This is a well written guide, thanks!
| j45 wrote:
| It's trivial to run mysql (or Perforce variant) or Postgres,
| with some minor caching for simple apps.
|
| I'm not sure what you are hitting that would go past the
| capacity of a small vps.
|
| Independent VPs for DB make sense, but if the requests are
| reasonably cached, you can get away with it (and beef up the
| backups) especially if it's something non-critical.
| LVB wrote:
| Definitely considering a dedicated Postgres VPS. I've not
| looked yet, but I'd like to locate a decent cookbook around
| this. I've installed Postgres on a server before for playing
| around, and it was easy enough. But there are a lot of
| settings, considerations around access and backups and
| updates, etc. I suspect these things aren't overly thorny,
| but some of the guides/docs can make it feel that way. We'll
| see, as it's an area of interest, for sure.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Spinning up a VPS for things like this is tempting to me too,
| but not having done significant backend work in over a decade
| my worry would be with administering it -- namely keeping it up
| to date, secure, and configured correctly (initial setup is
| easy). What's the popular way of handling that these days?
| Onavo wrote:
| What they need is a payment provider integration so you can ACH
| or credit card pay immediately. That can also be a monetisation
| option for them.
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| You just invented money laundering
| Onavo wrote:
| Not really, the KYC is usually done on the payment layer
| depending on which payment platform you use. If you are doing
| your own ACH, yes, you will need KYC. But if you are using
| something like stripe connect or dots.dev then KYC is their
| problem.
| Reubend wrote:
| There are dozens of other apps that do that already, and I
| don't think this one needs to follow. Staying open source,
| free, and convenient for cash transactions is better in my
| opinion.
| jedberg wrote:
| I'll email this to you, but you could save a ton of money using a
| serverless database solution like Supabase or NeonDB.
| hahahacorn wrote:
| The inefficiency is bonkers but understandable. I could host this
| app for like ~$60/year, generously, with little to no devops
| work. It's painful to see the creator paying out of pocket for
| such a great project because the Vercel marketing introduced such
| massive inefficiencies to the ecosystem.
|
| Even less when I pay for a dedicated machine running all of my
| hobby projects. Gratuitous Kamal 2 plug. Run your personal
| projects all on one machine.
| JamesonNetworks wrote:
| Where would you host this for $60 a year?
| misiek08 wrote:
| I would use hosting with SSH access. I am based in Poland so
| we have MyDevil.net But also you can just rent VPS for 5$,
| but you have to care about setting everything up.
|
| First thing I thought while reading was Firebase - it's
| interesting how much it would cost there.
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