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Ask HN: How much do you pay for cloud service each month?

4 points by stewie2 ↗ HN
Hello hackers,

I'm working on my first app, which uses a cloud service as the back-end. I never seriously thought about cost until recently I talked to a friend, who is about to release his photo app. He told me that it is very easy to spend $200k per month on an app.

I think this is a shocking number, consider many apps can't be profitable at beginning (instagram/twitter). I can't afford to release an app if it will cost me that much.

I have no experience of managing an app, nor can I predict the cost. Before I decided to post this, I did check some online articles comparing cloud pricing. But those pricing numbers are very obscure without concrete examples. I want to see some data points like this:

type of app: phone app (or website)

choice of cloud service: Amazon EC2 (or app engine/ heroku/ Azure/ parse)

userbase: 500k

data types: both text and binary file (image, video ...)

monthly cost: $200k

I know it really depends on the app, and a well-written code can significantly reduce cost. But I just want to have some rough idea. To be frank, my budget for maintaining my app is $1000/month at most. I don't know what kind of userbase I can support with that kind of money. Or must I be founded by VC?

10 comments

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patio11
It won't cost you that much, because you're almost certainly not going to be successful as Instagram or Twitter. If you are, you have what is called a "high class problem."

Here's a less stratospheric comparable for you: I run a business with something like 250k users and 10~20k monthly active users, with those numbers representing people with accounts. The costs to run the business are do not scale linearly with traffic, at all. I spend about $300 a month on hosting (VPS at Rackspace) and bandwidth and another few hundred bucks on various recurring things (server monitoring, analytics solutions, etc).

The overwhelmingly likely source of failure for your application is not that it will bankrupt you with hosting cost. It is that you will not be able to convince two dozen people to actually use it. This should be the worry that wakes you up screaming in the middle of the night and causes you to go get advice from people you think are credible. It is far and away your largest source of risk. Pick any population of startups which you admire: their #1 scaling problem is that they have no scaling problems at all!

stewie2
Thank you. Does your website involve file uploading? like for example images?

I'm looking at the pricing page of parse.com, it charges 5 cents for 1000 database accesses. I have accessed the database for 9000 times for the past 30days, I will need to pay 45 cents for my activity.

Assuming my activity can represents 3 typical active users, That means I need to pay 15 cents for one active user. Consider I have 500k active users, I need to pay $75000 each month.

Is parse.com too expensive?

arockwell
If you are currently at roughly 0 active users, I would not worry about how much 500k active users cost.

That said, I think something about your cost estimate is way off. It should not cost $75k/mo to host 500k active users. My guess is that either:

  1) Your use case analysis is on the high side
  2) You are using parse incorrectly 
  3) Parse is a bad fit for your application
You can rent 100s of servers from aws for $75k/mo. That should be way overkill to handle 500k active users.
mbenjaminsmith
I'd be surprised if Instagram was paying that much. I've known at least one person sharing video at 1 million uniques per day and his cost was a fraction of 200k (though I don't remember how much exactly).

The chances of you going outside your 1k budget before you can take on investment or earn some revenue are basically zero.

stewie2
Amazon charges $0.1 for 1GB storage. suppose one active user uploads 5 pictures each day on average and each picture takes up 1mb. If you have 500k active users, they can use up 500k x 5mb = 2500GB = $250.

$250 x 30 = $7500

because this cost is accumulative, within a year, the monthly bill will be as high as $75000. This is just the data storage. There are extra fees for database access, bandwidth ...

mbenjaminsmith
"The photos themselves go straight to Amazon S3, which currently stores several terabytes of photo data for us."

http://instagram-engineering.tumblr.com/post/13649370142/wha...

That was 7 months ago, so let's say 5TB today. Plugging that into the calculator for AWS says Instagram pays a whopping $500 for photo storage each month.

I don't want to take the time to do it myself but here http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/4/9/the-instagram-archi... someone punches (in the comments) all of their numbers into the AWS calculator. He comes up with 12k per month based on what they've said they're running.

statictype
Yes, this is true if each user uploads 5 photos every day. In reality, 90% of the users may upload a single photo every week.
statictype
200k a month seems absurd.

Even reddit spends only like 20k a month (From what I remember reading about them) and they have far more users then 500k.

Like patio11 said, I'd first worry about getting to 2k users before worrying about hosting charges.

stewie2
reddit can't upload images, can it? Also, does reddit use any cloud service? I heard that the money you pay for cloud storage can buy you much large hard drive. Because cloud storage has data redundancy.
statictype
Yes, I suppose there's not much storage requirements in reddit. However, storage is relatively cheap. I assume most of the costs you're looking at are in CPU/Network/IO charges right?