I get about 30-40K unique sessions per month, so a little over 10% are paying users. We gave all accounts that signed up prior to going paid free lifetime accounts, and many of them still use the site... so it's a weird mix.
There's definitely stuff I can do to make AWS cheaper. Starting with just remembering to pre-pay for my instances ahead of time. One of my least favorite things to do is to log into the AWS console, so I try to do it as little as possible.
The CPU intensive part is due to autosave. When a lot of people are writing concurrently (even on the order of hundreds), that was usually what would take down the site in the old days. The site is weird in the sense that there are 10x more writes than reads, and then doing all of the linguistic analysis, badge granting, stats generating cause spikes when they happen as well. I'm @buster on Twitter if you want to continue the discussion there.
Thank you! I'm a firm believer that I agree with all advice sometimes, including my own. In that spirit, my advice that is sometimes useful is to ignore B2B and B2C labels and to look instead at what you think you can build that people would be willing to pay for. Then to test that hypothesis as early and as many times as possible. The biggest difference between bootstrapping and VC-strapping is that every step on the path of bootstrapping has to be able to sustain itself long enough to get to the next step. SaaS models are great for this because they can scale with the revenue. I'm happy to go into more detail about any of this but it's a huge topic so we'd need to narrow it down a bit more to prevent this from turning into a novel.
The other responses were accurate. Part of it is to be able to afford a little extra help, part of it is to re-spark excitement in the project with people, and part of it is to buy a little extra time to work on it full-time since the sad truth is that without my other income we're not actually able to live in the Bay Area with a family of four even on this revenue. An alternative is to move somewhere cheaper, which we're also considering.
I also added a breakdown of costs to another comment deeper in this thread, in case that's of interest.
It is slow! No question about it. :) To be honest, most of my projects have either gotten popular fast or died slow deaths. Slow, steady growth is the anomaly and it's taken me 10 years to really appreciate how weird and special that is.
And wow, the other comments to this comment really made my day. I haven't been to Hacker News in a while but it's amazing to see that it's turned into a positive environment.
Okay, I looked over our financial statement from 2018, summed a few things up that would be way too boring to provide in detail, and turned the numbers into percentages so that you don't have to do all the math in your head. Here's what I have:
2018 costs:
48% to salaries and contractors (my wife and I are the only people on payroll, and draw $60k salaries for ourselves)
12.1% to operations (health insurance, renting a desk at WeWork, minimal travel, lot of SaaS subscriptions, misc equipment and other costs)
7.5% to PayPal fees (I really need to renegotiate this)
4.9% to AWS
4.2% to payroll taxes and other business administration
23% to profit (goes to saving up to quit my job last year, finish my book, and then dedicate ourselves to this full time)
Hope that's useful! Let me know if you have any other questions about this stuff and I'll do my best to be as transparent as I can without revealing every little detail.
Update: I should also mention that the salary we draw is in now way sufficient to actually support a family of 4 in Berkeley, so since quitting my tech job last October, we've been draining our savings and preparing to find a way to turn this little business into something that could sustain us longer term. I call it our flying rickshaw (the opposite of a rocketship). Outcome still uncertain.
I’m the creator of the site in question and am just seeing this thread. Happy to answer questions about motivations, costs, etc if you give me a minute to finish lunch and get back to my computer!
This is a great point. I’m the creator of 750words.com and am happy to provide loose estimation of costs if it’s useful. It’ll take me some time to put together, and I’m not at my computer, but I can share high-level numbers in a bit if it’s of interest.