7 ms·

Neat project. Where does the funding come from?

binwiederhier 4y ago
It's quite cheap to run. It's just one small EC2 instance, and it's usually idling around a load average of 0.1 (though right now it's at 1, hehe). It costs me about $24/month. The Apple developer license costs $100 per year, so it's ~$400/year. As of recently, that's entirely covered by donations. I am incredibly humbled by the sponsorships. I would have never thought ntfy would take off like that. I love open source and I promise it'll always be free and open (as long as I can reasonably fight of the abusers). If you'd like to help me out me, you can donate via GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/binwiederhier https://github.com/sponsors/binwiederhier
- jacooper 4y ago
  If you would like to lower the cost more, I think switching to a cheaper cloud service like Linode or Hetzner would be the way to go.
  - methyl 4y ago
    I'm not sure if it's worth going any lower than $24/month
    - Bluecobra 4y ago
      If I were to run my own personal instance of this that cost would be quite high. A free Oracle Cloud VM or $5 Digital Ocean droplet would be the way I go.
      - SteveNuts 4y ago
        A free Oracle Cloud VM still costs you your soul, in perpetuity.
        recuter 4y ago
        That can't be right, some of us have worked for IBM and no longer have souls.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        IBM and Oracle have a soul-sharing deal signed.
        vasco 4y ago
        They went to court over it and depending on the number of CPUs you use you might be forced to have one or two kids to pay the extra souls.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Yeah, I think that "or two" in "one or two kids" is still being litigated. My reading is that it'll stay in litigation indefinitely, as this is the price both companies agreed to pay when they decided to retain lawyers from Hell itself.
      - hamburglar 4y ago
        Well, of course. “$24 per month seems high for running my own personal instance that’s going to do a handful of notifications daily” vs “$24 per month seems high for running a public service that could very easily need to be scaled up quickly” are two very different statements.
      - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
        If I go by $50/hour salary on average for developer, if someone saves 20 minutes per month on average using AWS, it is worth it.
        conductr 4y ago
        Except where worth it in dollars < worth it in hassle
        selcuka 4y ago
        If it's a single EC2 instance and not using any other AWS services, I fail to see the difference between Hetzner, DigitalOcean or AWS. That being said, it's probably not worth migrating to another provider at this point.
        YetAnotherNick 4y ago
        I only have experience with Digital ocean and AWS. AWS free support is definitely much better than Digital Ocean. Also Digital Ocean is more quicker to delete your data than AWS in case of billing issue or anything.
      - abnercoimbre 4y ago
        Would the $5 droplet scale (and charge appropriately) if their specified bandwidth is exceeded?
    - jacooper 4y ago
      I mean from 24 to 10 is a big difference.
- webmobdev 4y ago
  You can probably cut down server cost by half. Have you tried with lower resources or have figured out a minimum requirement for the server? As an experiment I suggest - https://tinykvm.com/ https://tinykvm.com/ - with FreeBSD or OpenBSD (Linux doesn't really do well with small amount of RAM).
  - timtom39 4y ago
    Just gave the developer $50 so he doesn't need to reduce monthly costs. I like the service running well.
    - binwiederhier 4y ago
      Much appreciated my friend. I honestly didn't opt for the cheapest server because I wanted it to run well. I don't want to constantly fight for resources or worry about it. It was supposed to be fast and be able to handle traffic well. And it is. It's not falling apart from the HN traffic and it has a lot of head room. Plus. It's doing 400k messages a day already easily. Anyway. Thank you so much for your generosity. I am humbled and thankful for your support.
      - conductr 4y ago
        Your approach is great. It’s odd to see so many penny pinching comments here, the HN crowd usually skews the other way.
        chillfox 4y ago
        I think its because this is a hobby project and for a lot of people the cheaper a hobby project is the more they can keep running before the money runs out. It's also that for some people optimizing costs and making things run on as few resources as possible is fun. But if you don't find it fun spending time performance optimizing to the extreme, and can afford it, then there's nothing quite like massively over-provisioning hardware. It makes a lot of performance and reliability problems go away.
- hamburglar 4y ago
  This is super cool. If you don’t mind saying, how many connections do you tend to keep open at steady state?
  - binwiederhier 4y ago
    Here are some stats from last night showing the volume of messages: IPs: 9756 Clients: 9980 - Google Play: 2796 - F-Droid: 5985 - iOS: 794 - curl: 62 - other: 343 Messages: - Successful: 310076 - Failed (rate limited): 104741 - Failed (other): 6511 Top publishers (* = limit exemption): 22908 matrix.org* 22352 matrix.gateway.unifiedpush.org* 18286 up.schildi.chat* 16134 192.124.x.x 14056 matrix.envs.net* 13376 108.35.x.x 7794 114.132.x.x 6035 112.78.x.x 5432 88.99.x.x 5366 138.201.x.x In terms of open connections, it varies, but right now it's 5k active connections. But there are many many self-hosters out there, and the people using Firebase (no "instant delivery") are also not counted in that. You can subscribe to the stats above using the https://ntfy.sh/stats https://ntfy.sh/stats topic (old messages are only cached for 12h, so half the day it shows up as empty)
    - dopp0 4y ago
      Any protection against DoS in place, like WAF? Public services on EC2 are very prone to this kind of exposure. Maybe some fail2ban?
    - praveen9920 4y ago
      Watch out for data transfer costs on aws after HN
      - binwiederhier 4y ago
        Thanks. I'll keep an eye on it. I have a lot of rate limiting in place, but for static resources it could probably be tighter.
    - ta988 4y ago
      Thanks this is really nice. Impressive to see that f-droid is that high!
- Donckele 4y ago
  Hey! nice idea and software. With the costs you mention how many notifications can you send? There must be a limit right?
- siculars 4y ago
  I love your work and admire your approach. But you should recognize a void will emerge and void get filled. Someone (probably reading this thread) will clone your idea and make it a supported for pay service. It wont be me. But some enterprising engineer/pm/group who was recently laid off in this downturn will probably make a go of it.

It's quite cheap to run. It's just one small EC2 instance, and it's usually idling around a load average of 0.1 (though right now it's at 1, hehe). It costs me about $24/month. The Apple developer license costs $100 per year, so it's ~$400/year. As of recently, that's entirely covered by donations. I am incredibly humbled by the sponsorships. I would have never thought ntfy would take off like that. I love open source and I promise it'll always be free and open (as long as I can reasonably fight of the abusers). If you'd like to help me out me, you can donate via GitHub Sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/binwiederhier https://github.com/sponsors/binwiederhier

jacooper 4y ago
If you would like to lower the cost more, I think switching to a cheaper cloud service like Linode or Hetzner would be the way to go.
- methyl 4y ago
  I'm not sure if it's worth going any lower than $24/month
  - Bluecobra 4y ago
    If I were to run my own personal instance of this that cost would be quite high. A free Oracle Cloud VM or $5 Digital Ocean droplet would be the way I go.
    - SteveNuts 4y ago
      A free Oracle Cloud VM still costs you your soul, in perpetuity.
      - recuter 4y ago
        That can't be right, some of us have worked for IBM and no longer have souls.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        IBM and Oracle have a soul-sharing deal signed.
        vasco 4y ago
        They went to court over it and depending on the number of CPUs you use you might be forced to have one or two kids to pay the extra souls.
        TeMPOraL 4y ago
        Yeah, I think that "or two" in "one or two kids" is still being litigated. My reading is that it'll stay in litigation indefinitely, as this is the price both companies agreed to pay when they decided to retain lawyers from Hell itself.
    - hamburglar 4y ago
      Well, of course. “$24 per month seems high for running my own personal instance that’s going to do a handful of notifications daily” vs “$24 per month seems high for running a public service that could very easily need to be scaled up quickly” are two very different statements.
    - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
      If I go by $50/hour salary on average for developer, if someone saves 20 minutes per month on average using AWS, it is worth it.
      - conductr 4y ago
        Except where worth it in dollars < worth it in hassle
      - selcuka 4y ago
        If it's a single EC2 instance and not using any other AWS services, I fail to see the difference between Hetzner, DigitalOcean or AWS. That being said, it's probably not worth migrating to another provider at this point.
        YetAnotherNick 4y ago
        I only have experience with Digital ocean and AWS. AWS free support is definitely much better than Digital Ocean. Also Digital Ocean is more quicker to delete your data than AWS in case of billing issue or anything.
    - abnercoimbre 4y ago
      Would the $5 droplet scale (and charge appropriately) if their specified bandwidth is exceeded?
  - jacooper 4y ago
    I mean from 24 to 10 is a big difference.
webmobdev 4y ago
You can probably cut down server cost by half. Have you tried with lower resources or have figured out a minimum requirement for the server? As an experiment I suggest - https://tinykvm.com/ https://tinykvm.com/ - with FreeBSD or OpenBSD (Linux doesn't really do well with small amount of RAM).
- timtom39 4y ago
  Just gave the developer $50 so he doesn't need to reduce monthly costs. I like the service running well.
  - binwiederhier 4y ago
    Much appreciated my friend. I honestly didn't opt for the cheapest server because I wanted it to run well. I don't want to constantly fight for resources or worry about it. It was supposed to be fast and be able to handle traffic well. And it is. It's not falling apart from the HN traffic and it has a lot of head room. Plus. It's doing 400k messages a day already easily. Anyway. Thank you so much for your generosity. I am humbled and thankful for your support.
    - conductr 4y ago
      Your approach is great. It’s odd to see so many penny pinching comments here, the HN crowd usually skews the other way.
      - chillfox 4y ago
        I think its because this is a hobby project and for a lot of people the cheaper a hobby project is the more they can keep running before the money runs out. It's also that for some people optimizing costs and making things run on as few resources as possible is fun. But if you don't find it fun spending time performance optimizing to the extreme, and can afford it, then there's nothing quite like massively over-provisioning hardware. It makes a lot of performance and reliability problems go away.
hamburglar 4y ago
This is super cool. If you don’t mind saying, how many connections do you tend to keep open at steady state?
- binwiederhier 4y ago
  Here are some stats from last night showing the volume of messages: IPs: 9756 Clients: 9980 - Google Play: 2796 - F-Droid: 5985 - iOS: 794 - curl: 62 - other: 343 Messages: - Successful: 310076 - Failed (rate limited): 104741 - Failed (other): 6511 Top publishers (* = limit exemption): 22908 matrix.org* 22352 matrix.gateway.unifiedpush.org* 18286 up.schildi.chat* 16134 192.124.x.x 14056 matrix.envs.net* 13376 108.35.x.x 7794 114.132.x.x 6035 112.78.x.x 5432 88.99.x.x 5366 138.201.x.x In terms of open connections, it varies, but right now it's 5k active connections. But there are many many self-hosters out there, and the people using Firebase (no "instant delivery") are also not counted in that. You can subscribe to the stats above using the https://ntfy.sh/stats https://ntfy.sh/stats topic (old messages are only cached for 12h, so half the day it shows up as empty)
  - dopp0 4y ago
    Any protection against DoS in place, like WAF? Public services on EC2 are very prone to this kind of exposure. Maybe some fail2ban?
  - praveen9920 4y ago
    Watch out for data transfer costs on aws after HN
    - binwiederhier 4y ago
      Thanks. I'll keep an eye on it. I have a lot of rate limiting in place, but for static resources it could probably be tighter.
  - ta988 4y ago
    Thanks this is really nice. Impressive to see that f-droid is that high!
Donckele 4y ago
Hey! nice idea and software. With the costs you mention how many notifications can you send? There must be a limit right?
siculars 4y ago
I love your work and admire your approach. But you should recognize a void will emerge and void get filled. Someone (probably reading this thread) will clone your idea and make it a supported for pay service. It wont be me. But some enterprising engineer/pm/group who was recently laid off in this downturn will probably make a go of it.