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Yes, exactly. Oasis brings in enough revenue to cover Sandstorm's serving costs (for Oasis itself, Sandcats, updates, etc.). Oasis is also very low-maintenance

by kentonv 10y ago

Yes, exactly. Oasis brings in enough revenue to cover Sandstorm's serving costs (for Oasis itself, Sandcats, updates, etc.). Oasis is also very low-maintenance for us, since Sandstorm in general is designed to be easy to maintain. So there's no reason to shut it down. Our other paid offering, Sandstorm for Work, brought in very little revenue, so it made more sense to make it free to drive growth. I do believe there's a future business in Sandstorm, perhaps centered around the app market and supporting paid apps. I believe that as long as we keep improving Sandstorm, a few years down the road we may be in a place to revive the business. But mainly I want to keep working on it because, honestly, I really enjoy it, especially now that I don't have to think about boring business-y stuff. :)

e12e 10y ago
I really hope this works out! I've yet to use Sandstorm in anger - but I strongly believe the "correct" model for a project like this is offer paid hosting managed by system experts (ie: you, the creators) - along with an easy back-and-forth transition path from self-host to paid hosting and back. Charging for ldap always felt a bit wrong to me - supporting open federated standards is kind of a selling point of Sandstorm in the first place - leaving it out felt like "demanding" payment rather than providing a tantalizing service I'd want to pay for. People point at wordpress - which are a successful business built on a rather terrible code-base, along with a rather nasty walled garden with a half-open gate (the theme ecosystem). A better model might be Ghost - they also offer paid hosting, but doesn't draw such a hard line between self-host and "ghost host" IMNHO. (I don't know how well Ghost works in terms of revenue, though). Would you be able to share some number wrt. hosting costs and current recurring revenue? How many paying users do you have, and how many more would you need to pay for the size of team you'd like?
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  FWIW, if you needed LDAP for personal use, you pretty much just needed to contact the Sandstorm team about it. But the general goal was "for Work" to cover features which were primarily only going to be used by decent-sized organizations, and generally that holds relatively true for LDAP.
- kentonv 10y ago
  On Oasis, we have 2132 monthly active users and 284 paying users accounting for $2376 in monthly revenue -- although some of these users are still paying from credit they received by supporting our Indiegogo campaign, so the physical revenue number is lower (and isn't on my dashboard for some reason). Our hosting costs from Google Cloud are confusing because currently we have some startup credit (which will expire in about six months), and the way they account for that in invoices is weird... But if I'm reading right, we spent $1552 in January, before applying the credit. We also pay for $35 for Cloudflare, $35 for G Suite, $25 for Github, $80 for Sendgrid, $50 for Mailchimp, $50 for eShares, and probably some things I'm forgetting at the moment. So, around $2000 monthly. We also pay an undisclosed but surprisingly small amount for Sandcats.io TLS certificates which we pass on free to users. To support any full-time developers we'd need Oasis paying users to increase by at least 10x, so something like 2500. Yesterday was a very big news day for us, which resulted in 6 new signups.
  - e12e 10y ago
    Thank you so much for taking the time, and writing such a candid reply. Also: > Yesterday was a very big news day for us, which resulted in 6 new signups. Ouch. (otoh, a steady 2% daily growth is nothing to sneeze at - you'll be at 10x in 116 days!) In all seriousness; best of luck. I think there should still be a bright future for sandstorm - a few more rounds of polish, a bit of luck and pr and sustainable growth should be very much in reach.

by kentonv 10y ago

e12e 10y ago

I really hope this works out! I've yet to use Sandstorm in anger - but I strongly believe the "correct" model for a project like this is offer paid hosting managed by system experts (ie: you, the creators) - along with an easy back-and-forth transition path from self-host to paid hosting and back. Charging for ldap always felt a bit wrong to me - supporting open federated standards is kind of a selling point of Sandstorm in the first place - leaving it out felt like "demanding" payment rather than providing a tantalizing service I'd want to pay for. People point at wordpress - which are a successful business built on a rather terrible code-base, along with a rather nasty walled garden with a half-open gate (the theme ecosystem). A better model might be Ghost - they also offer paid hosting, but doesn't draw such a hard line between self-host and "ghost host" IMNHO. (I don't know how well Ghost works in terms of revenue, though). Would you be able to share some number wrt. hosting costs and current recurring revenue? How many paying users do you have, and how many more would you need to pay for the size of team you'd like?

ocdtrekkie 10y ago
FWIW, if you needed LDAP for personal use, you pretty much just needed to contact the Sandstorm team about it. But the general goal was "for Work" to cover features which were primarily only going to be used by decent-sized organizations, and generally that holds relatively true for LDAP.
kentonv 10y ago
On Oasis, we have 2132 monthly active users and 284 paying users accounting for $2376 in monthly revenue -- although some of these users are still paying from credit they received by supporting our Indiegogo campaign, so the physical revenue number is lower (and isn't on my dashboard for some reason). Our hosting costs from Google Cloud are confusing because currently we have some startup credit (which will expire in about six months), and the way they account for that in invoices is weird... But if I'm reading right, we spent $1552 in January, before applying the credit. We also pay for $35 for Cloudflare, $35 for G Suite, $25 for Github, $80 for Sendgrid, $50 for Mailchimp, $50 for eShares, and probably some things I'm forgetting at the moment. So, around $2000 monthly. We also pay an undisclosed but surprisingly small amount for Sandcats.io TLS certificates which we pass on free to users. To support any full-time developers we'd need Oasis paying users to increase by at least 10x, so something like 2500. Yesterday was a very big news day for us, which resulted in 6 new signups.
- e12e 10y ago
  Thank you so much for taking the time, and writing such a candid reply. Also: > Yesterday was a very big news day for us, which resulted in 6 new signups. Ouch. (otoh, a steady 2% daily growth is nothing to sneeze at - you'll be at 10x in 116 days!) In all seriousness; best of luck. I think there should still be a bright future for sandstorm - a few more rounds of polish, a bit of luck and pr and sustainable growth should be very much in reach.