I think both you and the author have entirely valid perspectives. Yes, you can hear from and read comments by all kinds of wildly successful people here, and th

I think both you and the author have entirely valid perspectives. Yes, you can hear from and read comments by all kinds of wildly successful people here, and that can be really cool. You can also hear from people who think $3.7M (I assume this relates to the Basemetrics post) isn't a lot of money even though, for most people and - let's be honest - for most of us, it's a huge and utterly life-changing sum that we'd be happy to walk away with for 7 years work. From my own perspective, my side-project makes just about enough money that it looks like from August/September most months I can now expect a payment from Google Adsense. Net hosting expenses I'm still not making any money (at all!)[0] but it feels pretty good that the project substantially pays for itself: hosting is getting close to covered, CDN and domain expenses not yet. I also don't have any time to work on it at the moment because I'm working on my house, but I do have plenty of ideas about how I can grow that revenue into something that perhaps ends up being more substantial. Not mega money, but maybe enough to cover the mortgage after hosting expenses and taxes. That's nice because it will make me a bit less dependent on earning a regular paycheck every month. [0] I don't really want to get into this but, to pre-empt possible questions about why this is so expensive (greater than the £60/mo threshold for an Adsense payout), I host it on a physical machine that's way more powerful than strictly necessary at the moment. This is primarily because I want to also use that machine for other things, but also because even a few months ago the site was getting hit infrequently enough that on (e.g.) Azure there'd be this horrible startup delay for most users if I went ultra-cheap, and I didn't want that. I went dedicated with Azure a couple of years or so back, which worked out more expensive than the machine I rent from OVH, so I switched to a much beefier physical box. I also use Cloudflare because I serve up a reasonable number of media assets, and using a CDN really reduces the bandwidth hit on my own box. Yes, I could do this more cheaply, but I don't want to because it would yield a worse experience for a non-trivial proportion of my userbase.