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Slack has a 5-year, $50M/year minimum commitment with AWS. From the document: > In April 2018, the Company executed an amendment to its existing agreement wit
by douglasfshearer 7y ago
Slack has a 5-year, $50M/year minimum commitment with AWS.
From the document:
> In April 2018, the Company executed an amendment to its existing agreement with Amazon Web Services (“AWS”). The amended agreement was effective as of May 1, 2018 and continues through July 31, 2023. The Company has minimum annual commitments of $50.0 million each year of the agreement term for a total minimum commitment of $250.0 million. As of January 31, 2019, the Company had a remaining minimum payment obligation of $212.5 million to AWS through July 31, 2023.
- graetzer 7y agothats still only half as much as Lyfts $100M/year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19282624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19282624
- airstrike 7y agoLyft is arguably solving a much harder problem than essentially IRC
- dymk 7y agoSlack is way more than IRC. Literally dozens of nontrivial features more.
- gkoberger 7y agoYou could also say "Slack is arguably solving a much harder problem than essentially a taxi company" Both are solving really tough problems involving a lot of users and a lot of data.
- underyx 7y agoSlack to IRC is what a library is to a bulletin board.
- throwaway400 7y agoAnd Snap spends $400mm a year with Google Cloud, not to mention another $50mm on AWS.
- moreira 7y agoPerhaps I'm just not aware how things work in companies of Slack's size, but... what do you think $4M/mo is spent on, for what essentially amounts to a chat app? I realise there a lot of extras in Slack (attachments cost S3 storage, video calls take bandwidth, webhooks take some processing), but as of January 2019, they had 10M daily active users. $50M/365 gives us $137K per day. $137K per day just to serve 10M active users? That's nearly $14 per day (over $400 per month!), for just 1000 users using a simple chat app. This is not including any staff, development, nothing. Literally just hosting costs, which should already be deeply discounted given the amounts and agreements involved. That seems... excessive? Edit: It's worth noting that $50M is the -minimum- commitment they have to AWS. One can assume the actual bill is higher.
- sidcool 7y agoThere is a lot of behind the scenes processing for Search, Analytics, Security, Enterprise enablement, internal tooling etc. It may not seem a lot, but the processing/storage needs are Mammoth.
- snazz 7y agoKnowing how famously inefficient the Slack application is with end user resources, I wouldn’t be surprised if their backend has been poorly optimized. I serve more than 1000 users on a $3.50/mo VPS with a not-particularly-efficient runtime just fine.
- scrollaway 7y agoCool, 10000 more of those boxes and you can rebuild slack "in a weekend for $35k/month". Don't mind the lawsuits when you lose your customer data and forgot to pay for backups for "cost optimization" reasons. Don't mind the complaints when your uptime is barely one-nine. Don't mind the customer cancellations when your 1000-user VPS doesn't actually scale to 20k concurrents. And don't mind the HN snark when you release your slack competitor without voice/video chat support, webhooks, apps, zero debugging capabilities when things go wrong, etc, etc. I don't even like Slack and I think their bill is too high but please don't be delusional, it's a tired HN trope.
- leowoo91 7y agoHow is that possible since even instagram spent around 10k per month for few million users? Am I missing something?