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.
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.
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 :/
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
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
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!
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
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.
Docker Swarm. After building a whole CD PaaS for ECS, I came to believe that swarm is a much more reasonable place for teams to start, so I built a free tool for deploying single-machine swarms called Rove. Do your own research though, and remember you don't have to use one tool or platform for everything.
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.
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.
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[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
> 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.
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.
> 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).
I'm in a similar situation; what resources did you find helpful for learning NixOS? Tho I could skip that for now and stick containerized, in which case I just need Nomad..but I'm not certain on picking it over K8s in any case. Just knowing I'm gonna have to deal with this soon and you seem to have it figured out enough!
I found NixOps when searching for an alternative to Ansible that is actually declarative and not just a "bash in yaml" runner. Our Ansible deployments took > 10 minutes and were not "congruent" (well explained in [1]): Removing the Ansible line that installed nginx did not uninstall nginx, so the state on all servers diverged over time and we had no clue what was runing where. Docker was also very slow because changing something early in a Dockerfile leads to lots of re-building, because again it's just bash scripts with snapshotting.
I thought "surely somebody must have invented a better system for this" and NixOps was exactly that. Deploying config changes always took a few seconds with that, instead of 10 minutes.
> what resources did you find helpful for learning NixOS?
This was already in 2017 so documentation was worse than it is today.
On a flight I read the Nix, NixOS, Nixpkgs manuals top to bottom. I also read some of the nix-pills, but didn't like that they went so deep into the weeds of packaging when my primary interest at the time was OS configuration management. In retrospect, I should have read those also front to end to save some time later when packaging our own software and some specific dependencies became more important for us. I also read various blog posts, examples, and asked some questions in the IRC channel (now Matrix), where there were some people that simply knew every detail and were willing to spend hours sharing their knowledge (thanks cleverca22!).
I also read key NixOS logic source code, such as the `switch-to-configuration` script that switches between 2 declarative configs (like many, I do not like that this is written in Perl, and I'm sure it will eventually be switched).
A thing I did wrong was to learn too late how to write my own NixOS modules; I wrote our own systems as "plain nix functions" but they would have been better as NixOS modules, because those allow overriding parts of the config from outside, and make code more composable (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41355203).
I spent 2 months prototyping all our infra in NixOps and learned by doing.
I also learned specifically where the gaps are: NixOS generally handles what's running on a single machine (with systemd units), and with e.g. NixOps you can access the global config of other machines (to render e.g. a Wireguard config file where you need to put in all machines to connect to, so {all machines IPs} \ {own IP}). It does not handle active cross-machine coordination, e.g. if some GlusterFS or Ceph tutorial says "first run this command on this machine, then afterwards that command on that other machine", or "run this command on any machine, but only run it once". So I learned Consul as a distributed lock service to coordinate (mutex) commands across machines. Luckily, the amount of software that needs "installation by human operator running commands" is continuously going down, declarative config becomes more of a norm.
With NixOS, a good thing is that while it is reasonably complex, it is simple enough that you can understand it fully, that is, for any given behaviour you _know_ where in the nixpkgs code it is. I recommend to use that approach (spend a few months to understand it fully), because it makes you massively more productive.
I also believe that this is a big benefit of NixOS vs e.g. containers on Kubernetes: Kubernetes is big and complicated, with likely more lines of code than anybody could read, and the mechanisms are more involved (for example, you need to know a lot of iptables to know how a request is routed eventually to your application code). NixOS is simpler (packaging software and rendering systemd units); it uses a more radically different fundament but in turn advanced features on top of it are straightforward (multiple versions of libraries on the same machine, knowing for every bi...
Keep in mind that this is a hobby project that is currently bleeding money. No more money is going to be lost if they lose their DB, don't have backups, go down for a week, etc. So a lot of the things you mention aren't really relevant to this case.
What would you prefer, this website eventually shutting down because the donations barely cover hosting costs and there's nobody to maintain it, or the website occasionally going down but otherwise actually being profitable enough that the founder can continue maintaining it on a part-time basis and keeping the site alive?
$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.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> Your database redundancy? Where are backups stored? Where are you streaming your logs for long-term retention? Where are you handling metrics/alarming?
Who cares? At this point it's a hobby project that makes zero profit and is bleeding money. No more money is going to be lost if they lose the DB tomorrow. No more money is going to be lost if they go down for an hour or a day or a week (in fact, they might _save_ money if they don't get more AWS charges during the outage).
They have nothing to lose, and about 6k/month to gain by moving to cost-effective hosting, which could actually make this a decent side-project.
> 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...
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?
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.
> 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?
Because it doesn't. ECS has its own complexities - perhaps as a result of EC2 fleets / autoscaling groups and more. Suddenly you need launch templates and it goes on. Have you tried updating ECS via CLI? It's largely confusing.
> Why use Terraform when CloudFormation maps better to the underlying primitives?
If only. It has gotten better, but historically CloudFormation has a lot of missing features and still do. Cloudformation can get stuck for hours and you'd just have to wait. The cross region support is terrible. Not to say Terraform doesn't have its quirks, but it's definitely not "worse".
The reliability/uptime guarantees of the cloud providers are dubious, but in this case I don't think they even need to be discussed: this product makes no profit. No money is going to be lost if the thing goes down, because it already doesn't make profit. In fact, just keeping the thing up is making them lose money, so short of completely shutting it down, moving it to more cost-effective hosting would at least mean they can keep it going for longer on their donations.
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).
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 €30 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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Cloud providers have gotten really good at selling scale anxiety. Very easy to reach $10k/mo when building on a modern web stack using managed services. Kafka alone could get you there once you factor in multiple environments and add-ons.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Another thing. There are several podcasts who have a free feed and paid one. Sam Harris’ Making Sense comes to mind with their free feed and a paid one for full access to all content. But they understand not everyone can pay. If one is unable to pay, they can simply email to ask for a free annual membership.
Pay what you want albums on Bandcamp are another example of a sliding scale. Suggested price $10, but artists can define their minimum.
That's a particularly difficult vertical to enter. Most large companies (and a lot of small ones) would consider them an "agency" and wouldn't consider any of their candidates. I know that Recurse Center, which is fucking amazing, ran into problems like this when trying to place their participants.
Maybe, but as a company a place that appears to be designed to teach beginners how to code isn't where I'd want to look for candidates.
I would look to reduce server costs instead. $7k/month for 2 million users seems like a lot. Do they execute your code on their servers? I couldn't really tell from their website.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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 $5/mo.
I don't know how much effort they've put into experimenting with pricing, but it'd be worth trying to increase donations, especially for such a well-designed site.
Never knew they had this, signed up immediately :)
Exercism is worthy of 120$ a year and worth its weight in gold. It has helped me learn Rust, Swift and Kotlin and I'll be forever greatful!
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.
I’ve had things with more users and 1/1000 would have been amazing. The difference between $0 and $1 is gigantic though, and a hard ask for content in most cases.
Yeah, I guess that's true, but it's something that can be worked on and optimized, and I have a feeling the OP hasn't focused much on actually making enough money to pay employees.
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 agree with the parent, I love exercism and although not a daily user I am surprised by this announcement.
I hope you would consider a "hard sell" banner ad for donations in the vein of Wikipedia before giving up on the model. I wonder if there are a lot of potential donors out there who would respond if they understood the stakes.
Yes. Like others here, I did not know there was a paid Insiders tier. Just nudging free users with a “consider becoming an insider” hard sell splash screen upon each login with a 10 second countdown would go a long way towards encouraging users to join Insiders and might be enough to avoid going the ad route. Then you are still offering a free option but I think lots will sign up.
Redesign the donate/payment page for clarity. Enable Apple Pay to reduce friction.
I submitted the article to HN after reading it and I have joined the Exercism Insiders - recurring $10/month, a very fair deal. Hope that has helped a bit!
As someone already mentioned please consider adding ways for monetizing, ads + remove ads, paywall, paid exercises, etc. to stay afloat.
Also please get in touch, email in bio, I don‘t have anything concrete in mind but would like to be in touch. In another life I would gladly be teaching coding, who knows maybe it works out.
Can you detail the $7,500 a month server bill please? What hardware are you paying for and in what quantities? Would love to compare to what we're using at Linode to see if maybe there is a better pricing structure out there for you.
You've built something great that 2M enjoy, remember that!
Fwiw moving away from AWS would probably get that bill from 7500 to 750pcm or lower. Cloud is very expensive if you've not made special arrangements or can burn VC money/free credits for your org.
I think we passed the 2020s and in 2024, nobody asks "how will we sustain this" nd just hopes that a VC will give them x$ which ... will them just buy... time.
Yes, I have deep respect for the people building such a site for the better good, but asking the "how will we sustain this" from Day 1 is important (not even how to get rich, just how to get break-even).
> 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.
>I would assume no one has ever run a business with payroll, or built something with this much reach.
Somewhere along the line between 2010 - 2012 and definitely post 2013, most of the HN comments are no longer founder focused or business minded. It is unfortunate.
> 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.
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.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 282 ms ] threadLife takes energy. You need to make some of it back to survive. Asking for money isn't a dirty thing.
- 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.
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 :/
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
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
Amusing. I walk away from all business partners that think this way
They hand waive away “who will pay what”
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.
Yes!
Most have adopted EKS-like services i.e. kubernetes.
There is fly.io that's closer. Hope they improve on the reliability aspect.
almos zero sysadmin troubles. might even reduce the troubles of working with eks/ecs.
now for storage and db, that's a different story.
It’s clearly not if the founder isn’t taking a salary and they just had to lay off their only employee..
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.
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.
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[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
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.
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.
“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).
I thought "surely somebody must have invented a better system for this" and NixOps was exactly that. Deploying config changes always took a few seconds with that, instead of 10 minutes.
> what resources did you find helpful for learning NixOS?
This was already in 2017 so documentation was worse than it is today.
On a flight I read the Nix, NixOS, Nixpkgs manuals top to bottom. I also read some of the nix-pills, but didn't like that they went so deep into the weeds of packaging when my primary interest at the time was OS configuration management. In retrospect, I should have read those also front to end to save some time later when packaging our own software and some specific dependencies became more important for us. I also read various blog posts, examples, and asked some questions in the IRC channel (now Matrix), where there were some people that simply knew every detail and were willing to spend hours sharing their knowledge (thanks cleverca22!).
I also read key NixOS logic source code, such as the `switch-to-configuration` script that switches between 2 declarative configs (like many, I do not like that this is written in Perl, and I'm sure it will eventually be switched).
A thing I did wrong was to learn too late how to write my own NixOS modules; I wrote our own systems as "plain nix functions" but they would have been better as NixOS modules, because those allow overriding parts of the config from outside, and make code more composable (see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41355203).
I spent 2 months prototyping all our infra in NixOps and learned by doing.
I also learned specifically where the gaps are: NixOS generally handles what's running on a single machine (with systemd units), and with e.g. NixOps you can access the global config of other machines (to render e.g. a Wireguard config file where you need to put in all machines to connect to, so {all machines IPs} \ {own IP}). It does not handle active cross-machine coordination, e.g. if some GlusterFS or Ceph tutorial says "first run this command on this machine, then afterwards that command on that other machine", or "run this command on any machine, but only run it once". So I learned Consul as a distributed lock service to coordinate (mutex) commands across machines. Luckily, the amount of software that needs "installation by human operator running commands" is continuously going down, declarative config becomes more of a norm.
With NixOS, a good thing is that while it is reasonably complex, it is simple enough that you can understand it fully, that is, for any given behaviour you _know_ where in the nixpkgs code it is. I recommend to use that approach (spend a few months to understand it fully), because it makes you massively more productive.
I also believe that this is a big benefit of NixOS vs e.g. containers on Kubernetes: Kubernetes is big and complicated, with likely more lines of code than anybody could read, and the mechanisms are more involved (for example, you need to know a lot of iptables to know how a request is routed eventually to your application code). NixOS is simpler (packaging software and rendering systemd units); it uses a more radically different fundament but in turn advanced features on top of it are straightforward (multiple versions of libraries on the same machine, knowing for every bi...
What would you prefer, this website eventually shutting down because the donations barely cover hosting costs and there's nobody to maintain it, or the website occasionally going down but otherwise actually being profitable enough that the founder can continue maintaining it on a part-time basis and keeping the site alive?
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.
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.
It buys you 150 machines for a month 12 core 24GB VPS with unlimited traffic on a 1Gbps link
See my comment below.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Who cares? At this point it's a hobby project that makes zero profit and is bleeding money. No more money is going to be lost if they lose the DB tomorrow. No more money is going to be lost if they go down for an hour or a day or a week (in fact, they might _save_ money if they don't get more AWS charges during the outage).
They have nothing to lose, and about 6k/month to gain by moving to cost-effective hosting, which could actually make this a decent side-project.
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...
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?
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.
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.
Because it doesn't. ECS has its own complexities - perhaps as a result of EC2 fleets / autoscaling groups and more. Suddenly you need launch templates and it goes on. Have you tried updating ECS via CLI? It's largely confusing.
> Why use Terraform when CloudFormation maps better to the underlying primitives?
If only. It has gotten better, but historically CloudFormation has a lot of missing features and still do. Cloudformation can get stuck for hours and you'd just have to wait. The cross region support is terrible. Not to say Terraform doesn't have its quirks, but it's definitely not "worse".
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.
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 €30 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.
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.
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.
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/CHAP_...
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A better term for OpenAI would be “rogue state”.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-11-20/who-co...
A true non-profit company in the UK would be a registered Community Interest Company, or a registered Charity.
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.
Typically you'd form a Charitable Trust or Charitable Incorporated Organisation, and Exercism isn't listed as either on the Charity Comission website.
Busy investing in AI?
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.
Having 1600 people sign in daily and never logging back again - creating 2M zombie accounts is I suppose critical fact that you are missing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If is low all you can do is lower costs, which should also be straightforward.
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
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.
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/
Another thing. There are several podcasts who have a free feed and paid one. Sam Harris’ Making Sense comes to mind with their free feed and a paid one for full access to all content. But they understand not everyone can pay. If one is unable to pay, they can simply email to ask for a free annual membership.
Pay what you want albums on Bandcamp are another example of a sliding scale. Suggested price $10, but artists can define their minimum.
I would look to reduce server costs instead. $7k/month for 2 million users seems like a lot. Do they execute your code on their servers? I couldn't really tell from their website.
Feels like you've been kickstarting a competitor/pivot on the side.
At my org it’s hard to get justification for donations.
However if this was something like ~100$ a year or whatever per dev, I’d be paying it today for my team.
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.
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...
- 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!
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.
Kinda like a dating app, where maximizing usage means not getting you hitched (too quickly).
One of my theses as an edtech founder is that the education can't be the core business model long term.
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.
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 :)
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.
Even if it gives a few useful features to subscribers, that's better than shutting down.
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.
But yes, rather than shutting down, I'd probably just put the whole thing behind a paywall to try and keep it alive.
I’m donating today and I wish you the best.
I hope you would consider a "hard sell" banner ad for donations in the vein of Wikipedia before giving up on the model. I wonder if there are a lot of potential donors out there who would respond if they understood the stakes.
Redesign the donate/payment page for clarity. Enable Apple Pay to reduce friction.
As someone already mentioned please consider adding ways for monetizing, ads + remove ads, paywall, paid exercises, etc. to stay afloat.
Also please get in touch, email in bio, I don‘t have anything concrete in mind but would like to be in touch. In another life I would gladly be teaching coding, who knows maybe it works out.
Fwiw moving away from AWS would probably get that bill from 7500 to 750pcm or lower. Cloud is very expensive if you've not made special arrangements or can burn VC money/free credits for your org.
Or maybe they have and therefore know you can’t sustain a “business” without collecting money to pay for your expenses?
Yes, I have deep respect for the people building such a site for the better good, but asking the "how will we sustain this" from Day 1 is important (not even how to get rich, just how to get break-even).
By any chance do you also donate?
Maybe you can reopen a free tier later, but for now you are in panic mode.
Somewhere along the line between 2010 - 2012 and definitely post 2013, most of the HN comments are no longer founder focused or business minded. It is unfortunate.
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.