5 ms·

I think they have perfectly selected features for plus. Service discovery, request queueing etc. are only required above a certain size of backend, and in this

I think they have perfectly selected features for plus. Service discovery, request queueing etc. are only required above a certain size of backend, and in this way almost 100% of the hobby sites are fine with open source version. And the hobby sites are getting reliability and security that could only comes with paid service for free.

pilsetnieks 3y ago
[flagged]
- selcuka 3y ago
  I'm sure you like your site, but to be honest anything that doesn't make at least $3,675 per year is not a business, it's a hobby. Nobody said that hobbies are insignificant, they just don't (necessarily) make money.
  - pilsetnieks 3y ago
    It's one cost of so very many these days. These prices (per instance!) add up; there are many other pieces of software clamoring for their share, hardware costs, networking costs, labor costs. It's death by a thousand cuts.
  - aftbit 3y ago
    If it were $3675/business/year, I might agree. But $3675/server-instance/year is insanely expensive for many very real businesses. That's $300/month! Imagine a business like Shopify, but with one server instance per customer. No way can you afford to do that if you have to buy nginx pro for each instance. Unit economics still matter to lots of businesses. That said, you can run quite a big site without any of these features just fine. Also nginx is open source and you can implement these features yourself, either using C or Lua, relatively easily as well.
    - lolinder 3y ago
      nginx is a reverse proxy. You're not meant to be running dozens of instances, you're supposed to stick one instance in front of a whole collection of application instances. Your nginx costs don't scale with your server load, they scale with your infrastructure complexity.
      - monocasa 3y ago
        Nginx is a lot more than a reverse proxy, including a not too shabby static resouce host. In fact Netflix hosts their videos ultimately from Nginx.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    You're saying anything that makes under $4k a year isn't a business, but you're using it to justify that anything that makes under $8k a year isn't a business. Because you're earmarking those profits to go to a vendor, which then are not profits. Are people not entitled to make $300 a month because they owe Nginx for a bot throttling feature? Can you run a small website without throttling these days?
    - kelnos 3y ago
      On the other hand, though, why does anyone believe they're entitled to a bot-throttling feature for free? Certainly someone could write and release a third-party, open-source nginx module to do bot throttling, if they wanted to.
    - messe 3y ago
      > Are people not entitled to make $300 a month because they owe Nginx for a bot throttling feature? Where is this attitude of entitlement coming from? Are people entitled to use Nginx's code for free? Yes, free software is a wonderful thing, and I do believe that most software should be free. But the reality, in this world, is that software developers need to eat, and relying solely on donations only works for a handful of projects (as does relying on selling support). Open-core is a reasonable middle ground. If somebody wants to reimplement that feature on top of Nginx and release it under a free license, there's absolutely nothing stopping them. If you want to use an already written and well-integrated version from Nginx themselves, then you can pay up.
  - harry8 3y ago
    Profit is the difference between hobby and not? Non-profits are not hobbies.
    - selcuka 3y ago
      I didn't say anything about profit. Non-profits do (and should) make and spend money, too.
      - harry8 3y ago
        Charities should make money? Best to you.
- golergka 3y ago
  It's not a significant amount of money for any business that gets this amount of traffic. Being this stingy on software your business relies on deserves derision.
- amerine 3y ago
  Big Same feels from me as you. I watched countless good things at Heroku get locked behind enormously expensive “enterprise” contracts.
ff317 3y ago
No personal offense intended, but I really /hate/ this justification. "Open Source" should not be equated with "Hobby Projects". It should be possible to run large-scale important things on pure open source. My employer (Wikimedia, which is a non-profit) has been running all our server infra on pure open source for many years, for very principled reasons. We even publish all of our internal infrastructure config in public git repos as well. We're an open-source-only shop that's doing very non-hobby work. We have thousands of servers, we run our own CDN on multiple continents, we have somewhere around a billion unique users per month, and our average global rate of inbound HTTP requests is around 135K/second. However, it keeps getting harder to stick to our open source principles every year as more projects shift towards open-core models with this kind of "Anyone who needs feature X is surely a big corporation making billions who doesn't mind running closed source software" type of thinking. It's not just bad for us, it's bad for the whole larger open source and Internet ecosystems if all the important bits for running at scale are locked up and hidden away in closed-source software.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  This is a rather weird point to make, considering the way Wikipedia has handled the collection and usage of funds. Investing in its technical infrastructure would be a less controversial usage of their money than what they are doing currently.
  - amitport 3y ago
    What are they currently doing?
    - justinclift 3y ago
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36029115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36029115
  - onei 3y ago
    As a theoretical exercise, I'm not sure that's strictly true. If you're reliant on donations, then income is never guaranteed. If you suddenly fall short of targets, maybe you have to lay some staff off. But stopping your license fees means you then have to pay someone to switch to an alternative. Avoiding recurring payments you can't easily stop makes reasonable financial sense to me. Particularly for a business that doesn't sell anything.
_cenw 3y ago
I like to overbuild my own things as a way to build a skillset, and I've basically only been doing that on software where only extremely specialized features are gated (e.g. Vault's HSM service, can't justify to afford one of those anyway).

pilsetnieks 3y ago

[flagged]

selcuka 3y ago
I'm sure you like your site, but to be honest anything that doesn't make at least $3,675 per year is not a business, it's a hobby. Nobody said that hobbies are insignificant, they just don't (necessarily) make money.
- pilsetnieks 3y ago
  It's one cost of so very many these days. These prices (per instance!) add up; there are many other pieces of software clamoring for their share, hardware costs, networking costs, labor costs. It's death by a thousand cuts.
- aftbit 3y ago
  If it were $3675/business/year, I might agree. But $3675/server-instance/year is insanely expensive for many very real businesses. That's $300/month! Imagine a business like Shopify, but with one server instance per customer. No way can you afford to do that if you have to buy nginx pro for each instance. Unit economics still matter to lots of businesses. That said, you can run quite a big site without any of these features just fine. Also nginx is open source and you can implement these features yourself, either using C or Lua, relatively easily as well.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    nginx is a reverse proxy. You're not meant to be running dozens of instances, you're supposed to stick one instance in front of a whole collection of application instances. Your nginx costs don't scale with your server load, they scale with your infrastructure complexity.
    - monocasa 3y ago
      Nginx is a lot more than a reverse proxy, including a not too shabby static resouce host. In fact Netflix hosts their videos ultimately from Nginx.
- hinkley 3y ago
  You're saying anything that makes under $4k a year isn't a business, but you're using it to justify that anything that makes under $8k a year isn't a business. Because you're earmarking those profits to go to a vendor, which then are not profits. Are people not entitled to make $300 a month because they owe Nginx for a bot throttling feature? Can you run a small website without throttling these days?
  - kelnos 3y ago
    On the other hand, though, why does anyone believe they're entitled to a bot-throttling feature for free? Certainly someone could write and release a third-party, open-source nginx module to do bot throttling, if they wanted to.
  - messe 3y ago
    > Are people not entitled to make $300 a month because they owe Nginx for a bot throttling feature? Where is this attitude of entitlement coming from? Are people entitled to use Nginx's code for free? Yes, free software is a wonderful thing, and I do believe that most software should be free. But the reality, in this world, is that software developers need to eat, and relying solely on donations only works for a handful of projects (as does relying on selling support). Open-core is a reasonable middle ground. If somebody wants to reimplement that feature on top of Nginx and release it under a free license, there's absolutely nothing stopping them. If you want to use an already written and well-integrated version from Nginx themselves, then you can pay up.
- harry8 3y ago
  Profit is the difference between hobby and not? Non-profits are not hobbies.
  - selcuka 3y ago
    I didn't say anything about profit. Non-profits do (and should) make and spend money, too.
    - harry8 3y ago
      Charities should make money? Best to you.
golergka 3y ago
It's not a significant amount of money for any business that gets this amount of traffic. Being this stingy on software your business relies on deserves derision.
amerine 3y ago
Big Same feels from me as you. I watched countless good things at Heroku get locked behind enormously expensive “enterprise” contracts.

ff317 3y ago

No personal offense intended, but I really /hate/ this justification. "Open Source" should not be equated with "Hobby Projects". It should be possible to run large-scale important things on pure open source. My employer (Wikimedia, which is a non-profit) has been running all our server infra on pure open source for many years, for very principled reasons. We even publish all of our internal infrastructure config in public git repos as well. We're an open-source-only shop that's doing very non-hobby work. We have thousands of servers, we run our own CDN on multiple continents, we have somewhere around a billion unique users per month, and our average global rate of inbound HTTP requests is around 135K/second. However, it keeps getting harder to stick to our open source principles every year as more projects shift towards open-core models with this kind of "Anyone who needs feature X is surely a big corporation making billions who doesn't mind running closed source software" type of thinking. It's not just bad for us, it's bad for the whole larger open source and Internet ecosystems if all the important bits for running at scale are locked up and hidden away in closed-source software.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
This is a rather weird point to make, considering the way Wikipedia has handled the collection and usage of funds. Investing in its technical infrastructure would be a less controversial usage of their money than what they are doing currently.
- amitport 3y ago
  What are they currently doing?
  - justinclift 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36029115 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36029115
- onei 3y ago
  As a theoretical exercise, I'm not sure that's strictly true. If you're reliant on donations, then income is never guaranteed. If you suddenly fall short of targets, maybe you have to lay some staff off. But stopping your license fees means you then have to pay someone to switch to an alternative. Avoiding recurring payments you can't easily stop makes reasonable financial sense to me. Particularly for a business that doesn't sell anything.

_cenw 3y ago

I like to overbuild my own things as a way to build a skillset, and I've basically only been doing that on software where only extremely specialized features are gated (e.g. Vault's HSM service, can't justify to afford one of those anyway).