7 ms·

Sourcehut Q3 2019 Financial Report

216 points by colinprince 7y ago

jammygit 7y ago
> In summary, Sourcehut is financially healthy, with an operating monthly profit of about $1,038. > The total gross revenue during this period was $9,172.00 Very cool for a donation-driven project to manage that. Congrats!
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Thanks!
- Aeolun 7y ago
  Monthly subscriptions are donations now?
  - JadoJodo 7y ago
    Subscriptions on Sourcehut are optional, hence the "donation" descriptor.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      A little bit of nuance: For the hosted instance, payment is only optional during the alpha period; unless something changes, sr.ht will eventually require some form of payment. Granted, you can also just download the thing and run it yourself since it's FOSS.
privateSFacct 7y ago
Fantastic.
eesmith 7y ago
At the given rates, just go ahead and sign up - I did. Support privacy. Support open source. And for those like me outside the git-stream, support BitBucket support.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  > BitBucket support You mean mercurial?
  - saisundar 7y ago
    https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-b... - might be relevant.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
      Yes, I understand that with Bitbucket transitioning from hg+git to only supporting git, Sourcehut is extremely compelling to those of us still using Mercurial. But it's not "Bitbucket" that's being supported here, it's Mercurial. The only sense in which Sourcehut can be said to support Bitbucket in the context of Mercurial is that there's a converter script that's supposed to help port stuff from BB to SH, but that's just an extra script and not part of the core offering.
  - eesmith 7y ago
    D'oh! Yes. I feel rather embarrassed now. Thanks for the correction!
est31 7y ago
It's a bit confusing. For some of the numbers you don't know whether they are monthly or for the entire quarter. It could be a bit more explicit.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Will keep this in mind for the next one, cheers.
vs2 7y ago
I am so used to working in finance that I assumed that was millions ...
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Heh, I wish.
romaniitedomum 7y ago
Is there any word yet on when Sourcehut will move out of "alpha" status? Is it ready yet for actual day to day use? Have to say this project is looking really promising. I think we need an open alternative to the Github/Gitlab duoply that de-emphasises creeping social media type features.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  There's a summary of what the alpha status entails here: https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/ https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/ And a longer explanation is coming in two weeks, for the anniversary of the public alpha's commencement.
  - romaniitedomum 7y ago
    Great to hear, thanks. Keep up the good work!
  - sevensor 7y ago
    Happily paying for the alpha, and using to host a personal project. Sourcehut already has more features than I'm taking advantage of. It does very well the thing it needs to do most, which is to be a git remote I can access from anywhere.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  > I think we need an open alternative to the Github/Gitlab duoply I think we always need more competition and offerings but let's be very clear, gitlab is an "open alternative" to the github/atlassian duopoly. We're not at a github/gitlab duopoly at all, and gitlab is open regardless. (Yes it has some enterprise features; semantics)
SwellJoe 7y ago
As an aside, I've found the Sourcehut source to be really nice. Super concise, very straightforward implementations, easy to read, and cohesive (it seems to be mostly by one person over a relatively short period of time, so that shouldn't be surprising). I like seeing barebones implementations like this, as it sort of shows how much one can accomplish if you don't get bogged down in bullshit like a fancy dynamic UI (that may be important for many markets and users but nonetheless it slows down development tremendously even when outsourced to another dedicated UI person).
- spectramax 7y ago
  I absolutely love SourceHut UI. I don’t have a word for it but it approaches the epitome of functional design. I’ve always been a critic of Stripe design - although it’s silky smooth and nice, those animations and what not are not as important as densely packed, well organized and information rich UI. People rave about Stripe’s design as if it’s something everyone needs to follow - I couldn’t disagree more. Stripe’s design is overrated and overblown on HN. Drew has nailed this aspect and I think he wrote about it in his blog. Today’s design fads are: Gradients (Apple), Magenta colors (Firefox, basically any SaaS) and Brutalist design (Dropbox rebrand), probably a few more that I can’t think of right now. This shit needs to stop guys. I don’t have anything against a designers but when a designer is designing for the sake of making something without drilling down why it needs to be that way - stop right there and reevaluate. This also applies to non-designers that design things as well. Design is about how things work, not animations and slick effects that wow the users.
  - SwellJoe 7y ago
    I find it clean but very confusing. e.g., if I'm looking at the Sourcehut source code here: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/ https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/ I would expect to be "in" the Sourcehut project, and clicking any of the links at the top would take me to builds, todo, lists, etc. related to that project...but it doesn't, and I don't see any way to go to those things related to the project. And, to add further confusion, even though I'm logged in, clicking any of those links invites me to login/register again. Frankly, I have no idea WTF is going on in this UI. It looks fine, but it's not at all easy to use for me.
philfrasty 7y ago
What I find interesting is the breakdown of monthly vs yearly subscriptions. 223 $2 (paid monthly) 104 $5 (paid monthly) 26 $10 (paid monthly) 582 $2 (paid yearly) 174 $5 (paid yearly) 62 $10 (paid yearly) I would have never guessed that more people pay yearly than monthly for a 20% discount. Has anyone else seen something similar for their own SAAS?
- edoceo 7y ago
  We charge annual at $5k USD. 1/50 buys that. I usually buy the year for the discount when I'm getting something (QB, BugSnag, etc) unless it's more than 3k, then I have a think about it.
- dajohnson89 7y ago
  the ironic part of offering discounts for yearly subscriptions, is that it gives customers an idea of what profit margins you have for the monthly plan. usually not something you want to do.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    Less so in SourceHut's case, where all of the prices are basically arbitrary and the financials are public.
  - wheelerwj 7y ago
    that's not necessarily true. Yearly subs give a business some additional benefits which can help to offset the 'lower' margins. There is some correlation, sure, but its not 1:1.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  If the prices are low enough that the yearly subscription could be the monthly price of another, then I can absolutely see this happening. As it is, the highest yearly amount seems to be $100.
- nh2 7y ago
  Paying things yearly makes 12x less effort in accounting.
Felk 7y ago
Oh wow, I click on stuff and it just loads another boring html page in a few milliseconds. One request, 4-10KB HTML, and it's absolutely beautiful. It really speaks volumes when a website deliberately sticking to over 20 years old technology is a poster child for great UX. Also small sidenote: Does it not properly sign the PGP test mails for anyone else?
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  PGP mail seems to work afaict. Make sure your key is up-to-date, I might have edited it at some point to remove the expiration date.
bachmeier 7y ago
I'm happy to see a competitor for the big services. I like that it has Mercurial support - we need alternatives to Git. I really wish we had something like this for Fossil (the one available cloud service for Fossil is not exactly usable).
H8crilA 7y ago
This report reminds me of Warren Buffett's famous annual letters to BRK shareholders. Straight to the point, clear figures, no bullshit hype about the future prospects, even the ASCII formatting.
yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> Everything works without JavaScript anyway Can we just take a moment for how beautiful this is? In a world where even documents frequently require arbitrary code execution in order to render, Sourcehut comes along and provides a full-on application with zero JS required.
- jonas21 7y ago
  I guess it's beautiful, in the same sense that ASCII art or 4K intros can be beautiful. But in a world where the change that I'll be using a browser that doesn't support Javascript is vanishingly small, I don't really see the practical benefit.
  - jdnenej 7y ago
    It's not that your browser doesn't support JS, it's that loading an entire js framework and running mountains of code is so slow. So now we are all bogged down with slow websites for something that could be lightning fast
  - spectramax 7y ago
    The world has moved on to depend on unnecessary (sometimes necessary) javascript based frameworks, single page applications that have an enormous complexity. The world works almost like an evolutionary process - the marginal cost of reverting back to previous way of doing things is too high even if objectively the previous way was better than today. Comparing SH (and other javascript-less web apps) to ASCII art or 4k intros is a shallow dismissal. How do you not see any practical benefit? Sourcehut works well and does everything it needs to.
elamje 7y ago
I’ve been following sh for a bit now, but I haven’t figured out what the differentiator is between it, and say, GitHub or GitLab. Obviously the UI design is different, but what are people loving about it on a day to day basis compared to the big two competitors? Any personal experience or comments from Drew would be appreciated:-)
- scrollaway 7y ago
  The one IMO defining feature it has that the gitlhabs don't have is mailing lists. This used to be one of my #1 feature requests on Github years ago.
  - elamje 7y ago
    This might age me, but I would like to know what you like about mailing lists compared to the UI of GitHub. What’s the selling point for mailing lists vs real time threads? I see a cult of people that like mailing lists and google groups, but I don’t quite understand how it’s more pleasant to use than modern UI’s. Any opinion on this?
    - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
      There are lots and lots of reasons, but one advantage that comes to mind is that you're entirely in control of the data, you can just take your mail spool and leave for greener pastures whenever you want. You don't even need an export process, you already have all of the emails in your archive.
    - scrollaway 7y ago
      > This might age me, but I would like to know what you like about mailing lists compared to the UI of GitHub. Me personally, nothing. This might age me but at the time I was requesting this, Github barely had an issue tracker :) Now it has group discussions which are… better than nothing. And the world moved on to real time chat apps anyway. But I still wish a project by default would get a "forum" which you can send emails to, eg. torvalds.linux@lists.github.io. This is not useful for tiny offshoot projects, but it's super useful for mid-sized open source orgs that would want a discussion/feedback area for users without polluting the issue tracker. With controls for moderation, access, etc. Markdown integration. And so on. What I mean is, just because it has an email input/output doesn't mean it only has to have that. You can still have nice UIs compatible with well-established protocols.
zaarn 7y ago
Sadly, not having pull requests, HTML mail and issue tracker is an absolute deal breaker for me, I rely on those for being productive. Otherwise, it's positive to hear that there is some profit made.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Something similar to pull requests is being worked on. I summarized this on Reddit recently: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dmkzgv/gitlab_rolls_back_tos_changes_update_on_free/f56asdl/ https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dmkzgv/gitlab_... There's already a ticket tracker. HTML email isn't going to happen, though.
  - zaarn 7y ago
    Well, I need HTML email though for my workflow, so I guess sr.ht isn't going to happen for me, sadly.
ahbyb 7y ago
Do you have plans to rewrite Sourcehut in a language that doesn't take 250 ms to generate each page? I'm afraid of what performance will look like when you get some serious traffic, and how your costs will scale. You may end up like reddit. Other than that, great stuff.
tom_mellior 7y ago
> The total gross revenue during this period was $9,172.00, which after transaction fees comes out to $8,511.83. That's 7.2% in transaction fees, that seems a lot. I always thought payment processors charged vendors in the 1-2% range. But I have no personal experience in this area.

216 points by colinprince 7y ago

> In summary, Sourcehut is financially healthy, with an operating monthly profit of about $1,038. > The total gross revenue during this period was $9,172.00 Very cool for a donation-driven project to manage that. Congrats!

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
Thanks!
Aeolun 7y ago
Monthly subscriptions are donations now?
- JadoJodo 7y ago
  Subscriptions on Sourcehut are optional, hence the "donation" descriptor.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    A little bit of nuance: For the hosted instance, payment is only optional during the alpha period; unless something changes, sr.ht will eventually require some form of payment. Granted, you can also just download the thing and run it yourself since it's FOSS.

privateSFacct 7y ago

Fantastic.

eesmith 7y ago

At the given rates, just go ahead and sign up - I did. Support privacy. Support open source. And for those like me outside the git-stream, support BitBucket support.

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
> BitBucket support You mean mercurial?
- saisundar 7y ago
  https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-b... - might be relevant.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
    Yes, I understand that with Bitbucket transitioning from hg+git to only supporting git, Sourcehut is extremely compelling to those of us still using Mercurial. But it's not "Bitbucket" that's being supported here, it's Mercurial. The only sense in which Sourcehut can be said to support Bitbucket in the context of Mercurial is that there's a converter script that's supposed to help port stuff from BB to SH, but that's just an extra script and not part of the core offering.
- eesmith 7y ago
  D'oh! Yes. I feel rather embarrassed now. Thanks for the correction!

est31 7y ago

It's a bit confusing. For some of the numbers you don't know whether they are monthly or for the entire quarter. It could be a bit more explicit.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
Will keep this in mind for the next one, cheers.

vs2 7y ago

I am so used to working in finance that I assumed that was millions ...

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
Heh, I wish.

romaniitedomum 7y ago

Is there any word yet on when Sourcehut will move out of "alpha" status? Is it ready yet for actual day to day use? Have to say this project is looking really promising. I think we need an open alternative to the Github/Gitlab duoply that de-emphasises creeping social media type features.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
There's a summary of what the alpha status entails here: https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/ https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/ And a longer explanation is coming in two weeks, for the anniversary of the public alpha's commencement.
- romaniitedomum 7y ago
  Great to hear, thanks. Keep up the good work!
- sevensor 7y ago
  Happily paying for the alpha, and using to host a personal project. Sourcehut already has more features than I'm taking advantage of. It does very well the thing it needs to do most, which is to be a git remote I can access from anywhere.
scrollaway 7y ago
> I think we need an open alternative to the Github/Gitlab duoply I think we always need more competition and offerings but let's be very clear, gitlab is an "open alternative" to the github/atlassian duopoly. We're not at a github/gitlab duopoly at all, and gitlab is open regardless. (Yes it has some enterprise features; semantics)

SwellJoe 7y ago

As an aside, I've found the Sourcehut source to be really nice. Super concise, very straightforward implementations, easy to read, and cohesive (it seems to be mostly by one person over a relatively short period of time, so that shouldn't be surprising). I like seeing barebones implementations like this, as it sort of shows how much one can accomplish if you don't get bogged down in bullshit like a fancy dynamic UI (that may be important for many markets and users but nonetheless it slows down development tremendously even when outsourced to another dedicated UI person).

spectramax 7y ago
I absolutely love SourceHut UI. I don’t have a word for it but it approaches the epitome of functional design. I’ve always been a critic of Stripe design - although it’s silky smooth and nice, those animations and what not are not as important as densely packed, well organized and information rich UI. People rave about Stripe’s design as if it’s something everyone needs to follow - I couldn’t disagree more. Stripe’s design is overrated and overblown on HN. Drew has nailed this aspect and I think he wrote about it in his blog. Today’s design fads are: Gradients (Apple), Magenta colors (Firefox, basically any SaaS) and Brutalist design (Dropbox rebrand), probably a few more that I can’t think of right now. This shit needs to stop guys. I don’t have anything against a designers but when a designer is designing for the sake of making something without drilling down why it needs to be that way - stop right there and reevaluate. This also applies to non-designers that design things as well. Design is about how things work, not animations and slick effects that wow the users.
- SwellJoe 7y ago
  I find it clean but very confusing. e.g., if I'm looking at the Sourcehut source code here: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/ https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/ I would expect to be "in" the Sourcehut project, and clicking any of the links at the top would take me to builds, todo, lists, etc. related to that project...but it doesn't, and I don't see any way to go to those things related to the project. And, to add further confusion, even though I'm logged in, clicking any of those links invites me to login/register again. Frankly, I have no idea WTF is going on in this UI. It looks fine, but it's not at all easy to use for me.

philfrasty 7y ago

What I find interesting is the breakdown of monthly vs yearly subscriptions. 223 $2 (paid monthly) 104 $5 (paid monthly) 26 $10 (paid monthly) 582 $2 (paid yearly) 174 $5 (paid yearly) 62 $10 (paid yearly) I would have never guessed that more people pay yearly than monthly for a 20% discount. Has anyone else seen something similar for their own SAAS?

edoceo 7y ago
We charge annual at $5k USD. 1/50 buys that. I usually buy the year for the discount when I'm getting something (QB, BugSnag, etc) unless it's more than 3k, then I have a think about it.
dajohnson89 7y ago
the ironic part of offering discounts for yearly subscriptions, is that it gives customers an idea of what profit margins you have for the monthly plan. usually not something you want to do.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Less so in SourceHut's case, where all of the prices are basically arbitrary and the financials are public.
- wheelerwj 7y ago
  that's not necessarily true. Yearly subs give a business some additional benefits which can help to offset the 'lower' margins. There is some correlation, sure, but its not 1:1.
Aeolun 7y ago
If the prices are low enough that the yearly subscription could be the monthly price of another, then I can absolutely see this happening. As it is, the highest yearly amount seems to be $100.
nh2 7y ago
Paying things yearly makes 12x less effort in accounting.

Felk 7y ago

Oh wow, I click on stuff and it just loads another boring html page in a few milliseconds. One request, 4-10KB HTML, and it's absolutely beautiful. It really speaks volumes when a website deliberately sticking to over 20 years old technology is a poster child for great UX. Also small sidenote: Does it not properly sign the PGP test mails for anyone else?

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
PGP mail seems to work afaict. Make sure your key is up-to-date, I might have edited it at some point to remove the expiration date.

bachmeier 7y ago

I'm happy to see a competitor for the big services. I like that it has Mercurial support - we need alternatives to Git. I really wish we had something like this for Fossil (the one available cloud service for Fossil is not exactly usable).

H8crilA 7y ago

This report reminds me of Warren Buffett's famous annual letters to BRK shareholders. Straight to the point, clear figures, no bullshit hype about the future prospects, even the ASCII formatting.

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago

> Everything works without JavaScript anyway Can we just take a moment for how beautiful this is? In a world where even documents frequently require arbitrary code execution in order to render, Sourcehut comes along and provides a full-on application with zero JS required.

jonas21 7y ago
I guess it's beautiful, in the same sense that ASCII art or 4K intros can be beautiful. But in a world where the change that I'll be using a browser that doesn't support Javascript is vanishingly small, I don't really see the practical benefit.
- jdnenej 7y ago
  It's not that your browser doesn't support JS, it's that loading an entire js framework and running mountains of code is so slow. So now we are all bogged down with slow websites for something that could be lightning fast
- spectramax 7y ago
  The world has moved on to depend on unnecessary (sometimes necessary) javascript based frameworks, single page applications that have an enormous complexity. The world works almost like an evolutionary process - the marginal cost of reverting back to previous way of doing things is too high even if objectively the previous way was better than today. Comparing SH (and other javascript-less web apps) to ASCII art or 4k intros is a shallow dismissal. How do you not see any practical benefit? Sourcehut works well and does everything it needs to.

elamje 7y ago

I’ve been following sh for a bit now, but I haven’t figured out what the differentiator is between it, and say, GitHub or GitLab. Obviously the UI design is different, but what are people loving about it on a day to day basis compared to the big two competitors? Any personal experience or comments from Drew would be appreciated:-)

scrollaway 7y ago
The one IMO defining feature it has that the gitlhabs don't have is mailing lists. This used to be one of my #1 feature requests on Github years ago.
- elamje 7y ago
  This might age me, but I would like to know what you like about mailing lists compared to the UI of GitHub. What’s the selling point for mailing lists vs real time threads? I see a cult of people that like mailing lists and google groups, but I don’t quite understand how it’s more pleasant to use than modern UI’s. Any opinion on this?
  - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
    There are lots and lots of reasons, but one advantage that comes to mind is that you're entirely in control of the data, you can just take your mail spool and leave for greener pastures whenever you want. You don't even need an export process, you already have all of the emails in your archive.
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    > This might age me, but I would like to know what you like about mailing lists compared to the UI of GitHub. Me personally, nothing. This might age me but at the time I was requesting this, Github barely had an issue tracker :) Now it has group discussions which are… better than nothing. And the world moved on to real time chat apps anyway. But I still wish a project by default would get a "forum" which you can send emails to, eg. torvalds.linux@lists.github.io. This is not useful for tiny offshoot projects, but it's super useful for mid-sized open source orgs that would want a discussion/feedback area for users without polluting the issue tracker. With controls for moderation, access, etc. Markdown integration. And so on. What I mean is, just because it has an email input/output doesn't mean it only has to have that. You can still have nice UIs compatible with well-established protocols.

zaarn 7y ago

Sadly, not having pull requests, HTML mail and issue tracker is an absolute deal breaker for me, I rely on those for being productive. Otherwise, it's positive to hear that there is some profit made.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
Something similar to pull requests is being worked on. I summarized this on Reddit recently: https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dmkzgv/gitlab_rolls_back_tos_changes_update_on_free/f56asdl/ https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dmkzgv/gitlab_... There's already a ticket tracker. HTML email isn't going to happen, though.
- zaarn 7y ago
  Well, I need HTML email though for my workflow, so I guess sr.ht isn't going to happen for me, sadly.

ahbyb 7y ago

Do you have plans to rewrite Sourcehut in a language that doesn't take 250 ms to generate each page? I'm afraid of what performance will look like when you get some serious traffic, and how your costs will scale. You may end up like reddit. Other than that, great stuff.

tom_mellior 7y ago

> The total gross revenue during this period was $9,172.00, which after transaction fees comes out to $8,511.83. That's 7.2% in transaction fees, that seems a lot. I always thought payment processors charged vendors in the 1-2% range. But I have no personal experience in this area.