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I always find breakdowns like this interesting. Just to get a feel for what others are using, their reasoning, and to generalize what others are spending monthl

I always find breakdowns like this interesting. Just to get a feel for what others are using, their reasoning, and to generalize what others are spending monthly/annually. With more breakdowns like this from more companies, I think it provides a great understanding of costs. It also can give people a good baseline for understanding what costs are at certain levels of users and with certain functionality. While I understand that these numbers also give an opportunity for people to point out areas where there may be potential cost savings or opportunities to improve infrastructure, I am not sure generic comments of saying you are spending too much or too little, or I don't spend that much are beneficial. A few key pieces of information that would help correlate these numbers in my opinion are total users on each plan, monthly active users, and the average amount of data required for the users. Just based off the Stripe numbers I would estimate that they have between 6000-7000 annual paying users (this number may actually be a little lower if the majority of users are paying monthly instead of annually). That does not include members that only trial the service, although I would suspect this number is small. Long story short, every business has different requirements and usage. What works for one company with 6000 users may not work great for the another company with 6000 users. I just hate seeing people say that someone is spending too much without knowing all the details.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
I think you're overstating it on mentioning alternatives. There's certainly factors that go into picking a particular provider that may justify the price or negate an alternative mentioned. So, I'm also against anyone mentioning them as a critique without context. However, the flip side is that many services have alternatives that do about what they do. They might do so with a lower price or more capabilities. People mentioning those in comments of articles like this facilitates the discovery of those products for people not aware of them. An example for me was arguing that much of what "cloud" stuff does can be done with dedicated hosting if it was setup correctly. That we just need a combo of the two to satisfy certain markets focused on security and dependability where sharing hardware isn't permitted but they want flexibility & low costs. Thanks to a commenter, I found out I had re-invented the concept of "bare metal hosting" and SoftLayer provided exactly what I was thinking about. I wouldn't have discovered that if everyone and I were just giving props to the OP or further elaborating their own use case. So, I think exploring the reasons behind the choices of company in question and bringing up alternatives are beneficial. One facilitates understanding. One discovery.
TheCowboy 11y ago
I agree and would add that it's easy to look at their spend and think that's a waste, but I think with many endeavors, an individual's time is usually the scarcest resource. Web services expenses aren't even close to their cost of adding an additional employee to solve these problems in-house. Learning to automate something a more seasoned *NIX veteran could do in an hour is not always a predictable time expense, and then they might create bugs or run into other issues. $100/month can a bargain and buy you time to do more important things. Researching services to use can turn into a black hole. There is always a better service that you don't know about. It can be better to decide "I will spend one hour researching metrics/dashboard services, and pick the best one I find, and spend another testing out the service." rather than trying to end up with the most perfect solution and testing every solution there is. That said, sometimes it's more time efficient to avoid having one extra service to maintain. One has to avoid using a service in a way that the business is too dependent on it, or that the service is not easily replaced. That's just part of what makes running a business hard.
- jeffmould 11y ago
  That's a good point about individual's time being a resource. There are many things I am good at and there are many things I am not so good at. I would gladly pay a premium to a service to have them handle the things I am not good at, especially when just in the startup phase. So while one person may think that saving a buck here is an option, for me that buck may be the difference between being able to continue business, having to hire someone internally, or not having a business at all. That's another good point about researching services can turn into a black hole. It is almost like the question of what framework/language should I use to build my startup.
  - 0xCMP 11y ago
    Exactly, isn't that the reason why startups "need" so much money anyways? To get the best people to solve problems? In that case, it's a one off and you solve the issue. Definitely seems like the smarter business move to me too.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
Eridrus 11y ago
If you assume that all users are paying monthly (not unreasonable, the $2/month savings are tiny vs getting locked into $96/yr), then they only have about 600 users since they're charging each of them once a month (hence the 7k billing events).
- e12e 11y ago
  It's a 20% discount for a time/budget management/forecast solution that I don't think makes much sense to stop using every other month -- so I'd be surprised if most that go from free trail don't convert to yearly subscription? (They could of course have 600 different users each month, and be failing due to big churn with their customers...)
  - destroytoday 11y ago
    The majority of paying users are monthly, but mostly because of the demographic—freelancers. Most freelancers aren't full-time freelancers, so they don't always freelance (and don't always need a freelancing tool). That makes churn the biggest challenge. I follow up with users who leave and have learned that they either don't have a lot of freelance gigs at the moment and plan to come back, or they took a full-time job.
danieltillett 11y ago
Yes it is always great to learn what other people are doing. I have no issue over the costs with paying for all these services as it is almost always cheaper than building/setting up the same tools yourself, the issue I have is the lack of skills/understanding that going down this route encourages. I like to build everything myself so I learn, not because this is the most efficient way to run things. When something breaks (it always does at some point) it means I can fix it. There is also the other point which is I love learning about all this stuff :)
- kasey_junk 11y ago
  You are certainly not building "everything" yourself. You are drawing a line just like OP, that where you draw that line is different than theirs is not at all surprising.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    I actual do “build" most thing - typing ./config && make && make install is not too hard, but I do think there is real value is building/installing your own tools beyond just the cost aspect.

nickpsecurity 11y ago

I think you're overstating it on mentioning alternatives. There's certainly factors that go into picking a particular provider that may justify the price or negate an alternative mentioned. So, I'm also against anyone mentioning them as a critique without context. However, the flip side is that many services have alternatives that do about what they do. They might do so with a lower price or more capabilities. People mentioning those in comments of articles like this facilitates the discovery of those products for people not aware of them. An example for me was arguing that much of what "cloud" stuff does can be done with dedicated hosting if it was setup correctly. That we just need a combo of the two to satisfy certain markets focused on security and dependability where sharing hardware isn't permitted but they want flexibility & low costs. Thanks to a commenter, I found out I had re-invented the concept of "bare metal hosting" and SoftLayer provided exactly what I was thinking about. I wouldn't have discovered that if everyone and I were just giving props to the OP or further elaborating their own use case. So, I think exploring the reasons behind the choices of company in question and bringing up alternatives are beneficial. One facilitates understanding. One discovery.

TheCowboy 11y ago

I agree and would add that it's easy to look at their spend and think that's a waste, but I think with many endeavors, an individual's time is usually the scarcest resource. Web services expenses aren't even close to their cost of adding an additional employee to solve these problems in-house. Learning to automate something a more seasoned *NIX veteran could do in an hour is not always a predictable time expense, and then they might create bugs or run into other issues. $100/month can a bargain and buy you time to do more important things. Researching services to use can turn into a black hole. There is always a better service that you don't know about. It can be better to decide "I will spend one hour researching metrics/dashboard services, and pick the best one I find, and spend another testing out the service." rather than trying to end up with the most perfect solution and testing every solution there is. That said, sometimes it's more time efficient to avoid having one extra service to maintain. One has to avoid using a service in a way that the business is too dependent on it, or that the service is not easily replaced. That's just part of what makes running a business hard.

jeffmould 11y ago
That's a good point about individual's time being a resource. There are many things I am good at and there are many things I am not so good at. I would gladly pay a premium to a service to have them handle the things I am not good at, especially when just in the startup phase. So while one person may think that saving a buck here is an option, for me that buck may be the difference between being able to continue business, having to hire someone internally, or not having a business at all. That's another good point about researching services can turn into a black hole. It is almost like the question of what framework/language should I use to build my startup.
- 0xCMP 11y ago
  Exactly, isn't that the reason why startups "need" so much money anyways? To get the best people to solve problems? In that case, it's a one off and you solve the issue. Definitely seems like the smarter business move to me too.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

Eridrus 11y ago

If you assume that all users are paying monthly (not unreasonable, the $2/month savings are tiny vs getting locked into $96/yr), then they only have about 600 users since they're charging each of them once a month (hence the 7k billing events).

e12e 11y ago
It's a 20% discount for a time/budget management/forecast solution that I don't think makes much sense to stop using every other month -- so I'd be surprised if most that go from free trail don't convert to yearly subscription? (They could of course have 600 different users each month, and be failing due to big churn with their customers...)
- destroytoday 11y ago
  The majority of paying users are monthly, but mostly because of the demographic—freelancers. Most freelancers aren't full-time freelancers, so they don't always freelance (and don't always need a freelancing tool). That makes churn the biggest challenge. I follow up with users who leave and have learned that they either don't have a lot of freelance gigs at the moment and plan to come back, or they took a full-time job.

danieltillett 11y ago

Yes it is always great to learn what other people are doing. I have no issue over the costs with paying for all these services as it is almost always cheaper than building/setting up the same tools yourself, the issue I have is the lack of skills/understanding that going down this route encourages. I like to build everything myself so I learn, not because this is the most efficient way to run things. When something breaks (it always does at some point) it means I can fix it. There is also the other point which is I love learning about all this stuff :)

kasey_junk 11y ago
You are certainly not building "everything" yourself. You are drawing a line just like OP, that where you draw that line is different than theirs is not at all surprising.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  I actual do “build" most thing - typing ./config && make && make install is not too hard, but I do think there is real value is building/installing your own tools beyond just the cost aspect.