7 ms·

I'm waiting for my services to die in a similar way. I too will shutter it when it does. 250k monthly users, but all the time and a lot of the costs are borne b

by buro9 5y ago

I'm waiting for my services to die in a similar way. I too will shutter it when it does. 250k monthly users, but all the time and a lot of the costs are borne by me and where I'm at now I don't have the time (the money I could afford, but it's the time that is more valuable). I'm glad to see this, I'm glad to see someone else also conclude that they don't have to take an onerous responsibility for something created lightly and that gained traction. This is what OSS needs too. If the project gets too much, just give it up. Even if others depends on what you've done, you're not compelled to do anything if you're not in a contract and no one is directly paying for your time. Not a donation, but payment to reserve time. Time is the thing. It ticks by, and technical debt and bit rot eventually make it cost too much.

caffeine 5y ago
I don’t know what your service is but that’s enough traffic that you likely find a willing buyer? I recently discovered that there is a pretty active market in people buying/selling smaller businesses and websites like this. Whether you like what the buyer does with it is a different issue…
- patio11 5y ago
  True regarding the active market, but generally speaking for your offering to be attractive to that market it has to be already successfully generating income above its costs. There is far less of a market for loss-leaders. (The exception to that, by the way, is that if anyone here ever builds anything so useful to a particular company that their sales engineers or developer evangelists are routinely using it or writing blog posts about how to use it you should absolutely get in touch with them and ask them to buy it.)
- TheCowboy 5y ago
  Another option would be to just communicate the limits of their commitment to the site to their users. Maybe people would step up to takeover/assist, or another solution would be found. At least users would know that it's on the way out in advance.
jeeva 5y ago
Ditto - I'm at the point where I either need to get my mind back into the space to (basically) rewrite an entire site (it seems), or let it die. I like it, but hosting it is doing nothing but cost me money right now. Hard choices, but it was nice to do.
tomjen3 5y ago
You are not obligated to run the service (whatever it may be). Run it because you want to, run it because you are exploring cool ideas. Work through the though spots because it is worth it and you are happy afterwards. But when it causes you prolonged stress, or you just don't have the time anymore you are free to shot it down. You can do that now, at x months in the future, or randomly when your servers die. I think your users would prefer that you give them an x months heads up even if they would technically get longer service waiting for your servers to die. You don't have to sacrifice yourself for people you have never met and who have done nothing for you.
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
>250k monthly users, but all the time and a lot of the costs are borne by me and where I'm at now I don't have the time are you not able to let any of these people know they need to pay or the service will go away soon? I mean 250K 1 dollar a month?
- cuu508 5y ago
  It's not trivial for a side-project to start accept payments. You may need to register a company, open bank account, find and set up a payment processor, publish a privacy policy, hire an accountant to handle tax reporting, write code, etc. All doable, but not a "let's push this lever and see if money starts flowing" type of deal. And it's not a sure thing the money will start to flow. It will definitely not be 250K 1 dollar a month. 99% of users will just go "fine, I'll switch to one of the other 9 still free alternatives".
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    I wonder how it would fare if a service followed the Amazon wishlist kind of deal, and have random unrelated users directly pay some amount to the service provider, bypassing the site owner. For instance Linode would expose 30 purchasable items for a site, and each item purchased by a user would pay for 1 day of uptime. As a tradeoff, money going to the project maintainer would need to go through Patreon if they set one up.
  - christophilus 5y ago
    Stripe can take care of most of the hassle. I’d at least send a “Save the service” email with a Stripe payment link (no programming required) and see if I can get some decent bites.
    - capableweb 5y ago
      Stripe basically deals with the easiest parts (the technical) and leaves the hardest (or rather, the most energy draining) part for you as a customer/business owner (the bureaucracy of having a business in your country of choice). If you start accepting money, you need to pay taxes, no way around that.
dutchbrit 5y ago
I assume you’re talking forum spam service? Had a look at your website bookmarks so sorry if I made the wrong link/conclusion. Why not use a freemium model?
CGamesPlay 5y ago
Well, you could try to sell it off before that happens. This genuinely seems better for everyone, even if the buyer has to turn around and start charging or putting ads up or whatever, the users get a better experience than an unannounced switch-off. You don’t have to lie about the numbers or try to get a three comma buy out, and you’ll still get some amount of money for your time. I just googled “sell my side project” and found a few marketplaces for that sort of thing. Might be worth checking out.
- buro9 5y ago
  For reference, this is roughly what I have... still not looking to sell today (that also takes time and brain cycles) but this is what I wrote in an email to someone enquiring by email after I posted this morning: So I wasn't looking to sell when I wrote the comment on HN, but the gist is: 8 years ago I created a platform for forums, it's a PostgreSQL database with a Go API layer. It's multi-tenant by default, so hosting many forums on a single server or cluster is trivial. That much is solid, and well maintained. But... I am not a front-end person and with that in mind I had the frontend built in Python + Django originally... it has no database, it's a pure veneer over the API just to use common templating for making the HTML. This part has not been maintained... it's 8 years out of date, Python 2. The platform I run has a number of sites on it, and I'm loosely aware that over the years other people had spun up instances of their own. Examples of sites using it: * https://www.lfgss.com https://www.lfgss.com (the biggest site on it) * https://pignolefixe.microco.sm/ https://pignolefixe.microco.sm/ (a french site) * https://forum.espruino.com https://forum.espruino.com (something to do with arduino and javascript) * https://forum.islington.cc https://forum.islington.cc (a pretty strong site) * https://forum.rapha.cc/ https://forum.rapha.cc/ (a private members club) A common theme is cycling. The entire thing is secure, privacy focused, very low effort to run. There are no adverts, no tracking, no stats... but web logs say that I served 1.5M HTTP requests in the last 24 hours (to now) and that's behind a well configured Cloudflare cache (those not signed in hit cache for 5 minutes, only those signed in get dynamic HTML). So that's what I have... a forum platform. Oh... what differentiates this forum platform? It has events... in fact the platform is bespoke, the idea when I started it was to have things like classifieds, events, polls, forms, wiki all be native top-level content within a forum. I never liked on vBulletin or Reddit how you'd have to leave the forum to collaborate beyond conversations so I was trying to bring it all into the forum (and thus compete with MeetUp, eBay, etc... who don't have communities and wish they did). Imagine Reddit, but with stronger sense of identity for subreddits, and richer content, and each subreddit able to be on it's own domain if they wished... that's this. I still don't know if I'm necessarily looking to sell... but if we get to the point that the frontend server fails in some horrible way, the Python + Django being 8 years old probably means the effort to get it working is too much. I did realise this, and started a frontend in Go to replace the Django one (I can maintain Go code) https://github.com/buro9/microcosm https://github.com/buro9/microcosm but you can see the lack of progress... I joined fast growing startups and my career accelerated too, that doesn't leave time for side projects.

by buro9 5y ago

caffeine 5y ago

I don’t know what your service is but that’s enough traffic that you likely find a willing buyer? I recently discovered that there is a pretty active market in people buying/selling smaller businesses and websites like this. Whether you like what the buyer does with it is a different issue…

patio11 5y ago
True regarding the active market, but generally speaking for your offering to be attractive to that market it has to be already successfully generating income above its costs. There is far less of a market for loss-leaders. (The exception to that, by the way, is that if anyone here ever builds anything so useful to a particular company that their sales engineers or developer evangelists are routinely using it or writing blog posts about how to use it you should absolutely get in touch with them and ask them to buy it.)
TheCowboy 5y ago
Another option would be to just communicate the limits of their commitment to the site to their users. Maybe people would step up to takeover/assist, or another solution would be found. At least users would know that it's on the way out in advance.

jeeva 5y ago

Ditto - I'm at the point where I either need to get my mind back into the space to (basically) rewrite an entire site (it seems), or let it die. I like it, but hosting it is doing nothing but cost me money right now. Hard choices, but it was nice to do.

tomjen3 5y ago

You are not obligated to run the service (whatever it may be). Run it because you want to, run it because you are exploring cool ideas. Work through the though spots because it is worth it and you are happy afterwards. But when it causes you prolonged stress, or you just don't have the time anymore you are free to shot it down. You can do that now, at x months in the future, or randomly when your servers die. I think your users would prefer that you give them an x months heads up even if they would technically get longer service waiting for your servers to die. You don't have to sacrifice yourself for people you have never met and who have done nothing for you.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

>250k monthly users, but all the time and a lot of the costs are borne by me and where I'm at now I don't have the time are you not able to let any of these people know they need to pay or the service will go away soon? I mean 250K 1 dollar a month?

cuu508 5y ago
It's not trivial for a side-project to start accept payments. You may need to register a company, open bank account, find and set up a payment processor, publish a privacy policy, hire an accountant to handle tax reporting, write code, etc. All doable, but not a "let's push this lever and see if money starts flowing" type of deal. And it's not a sure thing the money will start to flow. It will definitely not be 250K 1 dollar a month. 99% of users will just go "fine, I'll switch to one of the other 9 still free alternatives".
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  I wonder how it would fare if a service followed the Amazon wishlist kind of deal, and have random unrelated users directly pay some amount to the service provider, bypassing the site owner. For instance Linode would expose 30 purchasable items for a site, and each item purchased by a user would pay for 1 day of uptime. As a tradeoff, money going to the project maintainer would need to go through Patreon if they set one up.
- christophilus 5y ago
  Stripe can take care of most of the hassle. I’d at least send a “Save the service” email with a Stripe payment link (no programming required) and see if I can get some decent bites.
  - capableweb 5y ago
    Stripe basically deals with the easiest parts (the technical) and leaves the hardest (or rather, the most energy draining) part for you as a customer/business owner (the bureaucracy of having a business in your country of choice). If you start accepting money, you need to pay taxes, no way around that.

dutchbrit 5y ago

I assume you’re talking forum spam service? Had a look at your website bookmarks so sorry if I made the wrong link/conclusion. Why not use a freemium model?

CGamesPlay 5y ago

Well, you could try to sell it off before that happens. This genuinely seems better for everyone, even if the buyer has to turn around and start charging or putting ads up or whatever, the users get a better experience than an unannounced switch-off. You don’t have to lie about the numbers or try to get a three comma buy out, and you’ll still get some amount of money for your time. I just googled “sell my side project” and found a few marketplaces for that sort of thing. Might be worth checking out.

buro9 5y ago
For reference, this is roughly what I have... still not looking to sell today (that also takes time and brain cycles) but this is what I wrote in an email to someone enquiring by email after I posted this morning: So I wasn't looking to sell when I wrote the comment on HN, but the gist is: 8 years ago I created a platform for forums, it's a PostgreSQL database with a Go API layer. It's multi-tenant by default, so hosting many forums on a single server or cluster is trivial. That much is solid, and well maintained. But... I am not a front-end person and with that in mind I had the frontend built in Python + Django originally... it has no database, it's a pure veneer over the API just to use common templating for making the HTML. This part has not been maintained... it's 8 years out of date, Python 2. The platform I run has a number of sites on it, and I'm loosely aware that over the years other people had spun up instances of their own. Examples of sites using it: * https://www.lfgss.com https://www.lfgss.com (the biggest site on it) * https://pignolefixe.microco.sm/ https://pignolefixe.microco.sm/ (a french site) * https://forum.espruino.com https://forum.espruino.com (something to do with arduino and javascript) * https://forum.islington.cc https://forum.islington.cc (a pretty strong site) * https://forum.rapha.cc/ https://forum.rapha.cc/ (a private members club) A common theme is cycling. The entire thing is secure, privacy focused, very low effort to run. There are no adverts, no tracking, no stats... but web logs say that I served 1.5M HTTP requests in the last 24 hours (to now) and that's behind a well configured Cloudflare cache (those not signed in hit cache for 5 minutes, only those signed in get dynamic HTML). So that's what I have... a forum platform. Oh... what differentiates this forum platform? It has events... in fact the platform is bespoke, the idea when I started it was to have things like classifieds, events, polls, forms, wiki all be native top-level content within a forum. I never liked on vBulletin or Reddit how you'd have to leave the forum to collaborate beyond conversations so I was trying to bring it all into the forum (and thus compete with MeetUp, eBay, etc... who don't have communities and wish they did). Imagine Reddit, but with stronger sense of identity for subreddits, and richer content, and each subreddit able to be on it's own domain if they wished... that's this. I still don't know if I'm necessarily looking to sell... but if we get to the point that the frontend server fails in some horrible way, the Python + Django being 8 years old probably means the effort to get it working is too much. I did realise this, and started a frontend in Go to replace the Django one (I can maintain Go code) https://github.com/buro9/microcosm https://github.com/buro9/microcosm but you can see the lack of progress... I joined fast growing startups and my career accelerated too, that doesn't leave time for side projects.