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The fact it has users actually makes it a negative-revenue company, since every message the users send costs GroupMe money. At 100M msg/mo, that's probably a bi
by nir 15y ago
The fact it has users actually makes it a negative-revenue company, since every message the users send costs GroupMe money. At 100M msg/mo, that's probably a bit more expensive than keeping some servers running.
- nknight 15y agoThat's less than 40 messages/second. Even if every message goes out to an average of 20 people, that's less than 800 messages/second. If each message averages 1KB (and why would it be that large?), 800KB/sec, or less than 7mbps. For high availability, I'd guesstimate maybe 6 physical servers in geographically diverse locations. If they're spending more than a couple thousand a month on raw infrastructure, I'd be utterly shocked. Edit: By the way, this kind of thing is nothing new. IRC networks have handled traffic with similar properties for 20 years.
- semanticist 15y agoGroupMe was sending SMS text messages, and while they're nominally just a tiny amount of data, the cellcos don't bill the same way as your local upstream internet provider.
- mgkimsal 15y agoCorrect. So... use that 800/sms/second. Even assuming they were getting SMS at a bit over .1 cents per SMS (highly unlikely - probably much higher than that), that's about 80 cents per second - round it up to $1/second that would be $3600/hour. Sheesh - is my math right on that, or did I move a decimal place? I'm guessing they weren't burning through thousands per hour every hour on SMS fees, but even hundreds would put a serious dent in a startup's pocket.