19 ms·

Go Read: One Year with Money and App Engine

189 points by kasbah 12y ago

SiliconAlley 12y ago
Congratulations on an income-generating project! That's an immense achievement. Perhaps the infrastructure cost is worth the headaches you spare yourself by being on GAE but have you looked at dedicated infrastructure from the likes of OVH/Hetzner (on both providers you can get ~2TB storage/64GB mem boxes for around $100/mo)? I moved all my projects to a single OVH box and it's been a champ. It does mean slightly more maintenance burden (ex you need to roll your own backup/restore plan). Perhaps it is a poor fit but that seems like a possible path to get those costs way under control
- greendata 12y ago
  Have to agree. Great article but it just confirmed my decision to stay away from app engine. What's the purpose of paying for something that's both harder to use and more costly than a traditional server? Datastore is great but I can get the benefits at a quarter of the price. At least with Heroku you have something that's easier to use.
jshen 12y ago
"Second, it is impossible to meet Google's terms of service with an RSS reader. They dictate that ads may not be shown along adult or copyrighted content. Determining that for external sources of data was not going to happen. I got a few emails about violations and added a system to prevent ads on certain feeds. But I was playing whack-a-mole and it would never end. Eventually I made a mistake and they banned my site. I gave up on ads at this point." I've experienced this myself, and I'm hearing it more and more from others. Maybe this is a market need that is going unfulfilled.
- jbooth 12y ago
  There's a great company that used to be called AdSafe, now called Integral Ad Science, that offers a service to identify adult or other non-ad-friendly content. http://integralads.com/ http://integralads.com/ I don't think it'd be feasible to run an advertising company that was less strict on adult/copyrighted content. People that buy advertising are really risk-averse on that subject, they don't want to see a meme on twitter or whatever of their brand next to porn.
  - jshen 12y ago
    Two things. 1) The content that got my site kicked off adsense was text only, and it was a girl writing about going skinny dipping. It was tamer than much of cable TV, but I'm guessing some word frequency algorithm thought it was more than that. We aren't talking ads showing up next to porn. The great frustration is that if you aren't a big player, google doesn't give a shit and maybe they will turn your ads back on, maybe they won't. I'm guessing there are a lot of people out there that would jump on any ad network that didn't make you fear this all of the time. 2) My assumption, and I could be wrong about this, is that there are a lot of companies willing to advertise that aren't as paranoid. They may be able to pay less per click for the same quality of traffic, due to less competition for opening up to content that is less than PG
    - jbooth 12y ago
      RE: 2), the difficulty there is that you're now chasing the long tail of small dollars in a high-initial-touch business. Maybe a self-serve model could work, but the big corps and ad agencies representing the big money in the market are really really big on the brand safety thing. I'm not saying they're right, but as long as they're the ones signing the big checks, they don't really have to be. I guess a self-serve business would be possible, but since your costs are the same for non-sketchy (for whatever silly definition of sketchy) content, you basically become a remarketer for the content that everyone else doesn't want to advertise on. You can sell it, sure, but it's a hard pitch.
      - jshen 12y ago
        I'm sure you're right, which is why I'm moving away from ads. The examples that give me some sliver of hope are reddit and tumblr, both of which have some form of ads.
        jbooth 12y ago
        Well, you'd think that Google could pro-actively not show ads on occasional 'bad' content rather than putting it on each individual website operator to avoid displaying the adsense iframe (or whatever it is) on content that might bother Google. They're already identifying it.. why not just not show the ad? And then only penalize accounts that have a really big % of unadvertisable content.
zura 12y ago
Btw, what are some good options nowadays for [almost] free website launch? Until/(if ever) you get "big" of course...
- noblethrasher 12y ago
  AppHarbor (a YC company) is nice for .NET stuff. It's free unless you want a custom domain, in which case it's only $10/month.
- ansimionescu 12y ago
  For static websites, Github Pages is free, nearlyfreespeech is very cheap. For full-blown web apps, didn't you hear the guy? GAE has a pretty generous free tier to test out stuff. So does Heroku, and it's way more user friendly. I still prefer GAE because I can use Google's tools. If you want to rent instances, you're going to have to pay from the beginning afaik. AWS and GCE are the usual suspects here. https://pages.github.com/ https://pages.github.com/ https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ https://developers.google.com/appengine/ https://developers.google.com/appengine/ http://heroku.com/ http://heroku.com/
  - zura 12y ago
    GAE looks interesting, but the main downside is that there is no free plan for SQL database (SQL Cloud service).
    - ansimionescu 12y ago
      I didn't use GAE that much, I only know that whenever I needed to try something for free, Heroku's plugin architecture comes in handy, since most addons have free tiers. They even support neo4j, an amazing graph database I just started playing with (and it's in beta, so they give a shitload of space for free).
- syjer 12y ago
  I'm using the free tier of openshift from red hat. The performance is good enough that I'm able to cram a java application powered by jetty + mysql + phpmyadmin in a single small "gear" (they give you 3 small gears free, 1gb of hard disk).
bueno 12y ago
Great read. This is especially interesting to me. My side project http://www.longboxed.com http://www.longboxed.com was recently launched to a modicum of regular users (~300). My app runs on Heroku on the free tier with the 'Hobby Basic' level of the Heroku Postgres database. All told it costs me ~9 dollars a month. No big deal. However, if I ever stepped the site up to another tier I'd be looking at ~50 bucks for the database and ~36 bucks for another process instance. These expenses can add up fast for a site that doesn't currently generate any money. Anyway - it is nice to see examples of introducing a pay model into your app after it has launched.
- heliostatic 12y ago
  Congratulations on launching. I've been following your development on tumblr and it's been great seeing your process.
hatelibs 12y ago
Published: 13 Mar 2014
simonbrown 12y ago
Did you consider grandfathering existing users in?
- m_coder 12y ago
  It seemed that he was trying to move the existing users from costing him money to at least a break even situation. In this case grandfathering existing users would have propagated a negative cash flow.
rootuid 12y ago
Nice article. Thanks for sharing! btw: Lots of typos in the article, be sure to spell check !
couchand 12y ago
FWIW, original lack of discussion [0] and [1]... [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7402393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7402393 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408089
- clarky07 12y ago
  I actually find this very interesting. How days and times and luck plays such a role. And submitter... Having the same exact article submitted 3 different times and getting 2 votes, 4 votes, and then #1 front page. That's interesting.
  - kasbah 12y ago
    I have no idea why this took off. I just thought I'd try and re-post it as I really like goread.io and the blogpost. I don't think the submitter matters. Maybe a little if people see that it's self promotion. But there is plenty self-promotion on the front page. More of a timing and luck thing I think.
BitMastro 12y ago
I would like to thank you for creating go read and making it open source, it's what I use as RSS reader, using my own free quota of App Engine. I hope I can contribute back some day. "30-day trial: This action cost me about 90% of my users. Many were angry and cursed at me on twitter. I agree that it is sad I did not say I was going to charge from the beginning, but I didn't know that I would be paying hundreds of dollars per month either." Honestly I think the sense of entitlement nowadays is way too high, people use a product that is free and needed weeks or months of your own free time, and then complain about it when you change it. If you decide to charge for it, you're a greedy bastard, instead if it's free, they say "if you aren't paying, you are the product". Other complain that the product doesn't work, when instead it's a case of PEBCAK. When it's not, it means you're going to say goodbye to a couple of night's sleep or a weekend or too, or maybe it's ONE feature away from being perfect (again). ...sometimes I hate people :(
- Ntrails 12y ago
  People get to be mad (within reason) when a free service stops being free without prior warning. Because they too invested time and effort in a product, making it part of their life, only to have that wasted when terms change. That is not to say, in any way, that you shouldn't charge - but don't expect users of a free application to change to a pay to use model en masse. Unless, of course, you don't have any competitors who do a similar thing for free...
  - BitMastro 12y ago
    True, but be polite about it: "Sorry, I'm disappointed because my expectations differ from yours. I'll found an alternative. Good luck with your project"
  - deeviant 12y ago
    Having to pay a few dollars a month is hardly a trigger for calling something "wasted"... In my own humble opinion.
- MrMeker 12y ago
  "Honestly I think the sense of entitlement nowadays is way too high, people use a product that is free and needed weeks or months of your own free time" How is he going to recoup anything for his time if you use his product in a way he can't charge for?
alec 12y ago
Interesting writeup, thanks. I'm a user and have been negatively impacted by the feed fetching optimizations - daily feeds are often a few days behind and come in bunches. Two examples: - Penny Arcade updates its comics Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, always at 7:01AM UTC, and then news other times during the week. It's Wednesday at 4:25PM UTC - 9 hours after - and goread hasn't picked it up. - Dinosaur Comics is updated weekdays. I'll eventually get all of them, but usually two or three at a time. For example, yesterday I marked all my feeds as read; today, I have entries from Monday and Tuesday, but not from Wednesday. I had hoped that the move to the everyone-pays model would give you the resources (either developer or quota) to fix these issues, but they've gotten no better or maybe worse. I haven't looked at what you're doing, but I believe Google Reader used pubsubhubbub where available to reduce/eliminate polling for many popular feeds. I honestly didn't have a great experience with my last bug report, so I haven't tried again.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- mjibson 12y ago
  goread has pubsubhubbub support. penny arcade doesn't use it, though. The penny arcade feeds are indeed giving errors. I'll look into those.
  - ecesena 12y ago
    At Theneeds we use a "sliding windows" approach to deal with polling. Say you run the scraper every hour. Each feed F_i is scraped once every n_i polls. If the feed returns more than his average news, then n_i gets decreased, while if the feed returns no news, it gets increased. Perhaps with a similar trick you can run your scraper more frequently on some feeds, still keeping the cost under control.
  - alec 12y ago
    Thanks! I don't really know when the website has a problem, when goread has a problem, and when I have a problem, so I end up assuming that it's goread problem. I like how the desktop web version gives a "last refreshed" and "next refreshed" indication.
grey-area 12y ago
I wonder if the author has costed out how much running this app would cost using a VPS provider like Linode or Digital Ocean? You can get a lot of resources for under $100 a month and the needs of most apps are pretty basic (file storage+db+web server). Given the memory requirements and speed of Go, it shouldn't take much hardware to serve a lot of requests with a few go instances behind nginx say. I'm not convinced that being locked in to one cloud provider's services and APIs is healthy long term - it means you are locked in to that ecosystem and it's harder to consider alternatives, even if your needs are quite straightforward, so you can end up in a situation where you're paying hundreds of dollars a month for hosting when you don't need to be.
- mjibson 12y ago
  What about the datastore? I can get thousands of requests per second (which I did when I released and it hit HN), and the site was as fast as if I had 1 hit per second. Traditional databases don't scale like that. If you want it to scale like that, it gets difficult and expensive. The datastore does all of this + multi datacenter replication + predictive performance regardless of load.
  - ccorda 12y ago
    Matt, you might want to look at DynamoDB, which would at least let you do a cost comparison to an AWS stack. This tweet from former AppEngine dev Brett Slatkin caught my eye: https://twitter.com/haxor/status/411351463806263296 https://twitter.com/haxor/status/411351463806263296 I still think Dynamo has a ways to catch up in terms ease of use to GAE, but it provides the performance, scalability, and replication like datastore.
  - grey-area 12y ago
    If you're caching feeds, would you require thousands of requests to the db per second, or just thousands of web requests? It'd be an interesting test to try setting up a simple stack of psql/nginx/memcache and your go processes behind, and serving up the same data from it, to see what sort of performance you get, but I understand why you wouldn't bother if your app is somewhat tied in to the datastore already and works fine for you as is. Just out of interest, did you start on something else and move over to Google App Engine for performance, or start there?
revorad 12y ago
Congrats Matt. Well done on testing various revenue options, instead of eating the costs just to be the "nice guy", only to have to shut it down eventually. Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch had a similar story about switching from freemium to paid only - http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-work/ http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-...
superduper33 12y ago
Careface.
programminggeek 12y ago
I'm actually a little surprised it costs so much to run on app engine. Given that you've settled into a more predictable user model in terms of costs and probably growth, why not lower your costs by investing in dedicated server space or possibly reserved instances on AWS (unless there is a app engine equivalent). Without knowing what your server load looks like, I would imagine you could save a couple hundred dollars a month in hosting, which would go right to your bottom line profit. A couple hundred dollars a month isn't huge, but at this point in your business that's say $2,400 a year. From the looks of it, that's at least 2-3 months worth of revenue or almost 5 months worth of profit. I think it's at least worth considering with where your project is at right now.
- mjibson 12y ago
  AWS doesn't have the datastore. From the article: "When you compare to AWS prices, no one mentions the datastore."
  - programminggeek 12y ago
    Yeah, I totally get that, but I guess I don't know what part of the Google AppEngine data store that works better or is a better fit than Amazon's DynamoDB, or running your own MongoDB or CouchDB or Hbase or Cassandra or whatever. What does Google's datastore do that makes it worth sticking to and paying more for.
  - wasd 12y ago
    Excuse my naivety but isn't data store just a managed nosql database? You could switch over to Google Cloud (AWS but from Google) and still use Data Store or you could switch to any PaaS and use something like mongohq.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Excuse my naivety but isn't data store just a managed nosql database? Yes, so what? Its still something you need to cost out for an alternative. > You could switch over to Google Cloud (AWS but from Google) App Engine is part of Google Cloud (the AWS-equivalent umbrella of offerings). You probably mean "Google Compute Engine" instead of "Google Cloud" and "EC2" instead of "AWS". > and still use Data Store You could (Google Cloud Datastore seems to be very much the App Engine datastore outside of App Engine) but its then a separate cost you have to include in the comparison. > or you could switch to any PaaS and use something like mongohq You could, but its then a separate cost you have to include in the comparison.
curiousDog 12y ago
From the article: "A simple rule in computers is to make something run faster, have it do less work. I remember reading about how grep works quickly. Instead of splitting a file by lines and then searching for the string, it searches for the string, then finds the newlines on either side. Thus, if a file has no matches, it won't ever have to do the work for line splitting. Done the naive way, it would always split by line even if there was no match. Do less work." Good observation, but I doubt if that's remotely even the reason why grep works quickly.
- akavel 12y ago
  Um, like, it is: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-August/019310.html http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Augu... still, see also: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.html http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.h...
  - curiousDog 12y ago
    I have seen those and those were what I was implicitly referring to. And if you did read them,"- Don't look for newlines in the input until after you've found a match." is just one of them but not the major contributor for speed. It's Boyer-Moore.
    - akavel 12y ago
      Hm, there seems to be written like so there: > Moreover, GNU grep AVOIDS BREAKING THE INPUT INTO LINES. Looking for newlines would slow grep down by a factor of several times, because to find the newlines it would have to look at every byte! (italics added, but uppercase original!) On my reading this sounds quite huge; I seem to understand the gist is that it's still a significant gain after Boyer-Moore. But, whatever.
pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
Go Read: using line charts instead of bar charts to misrepresent monthly earnings
psankar 12y ago
A long time user of your app, but from my own quota of appengine. Thank you for such a lovely product. Someday I would like to contribute to your project(s) more.
hueving 12y ago
>Again, it's free software so I'm not sure what the problem is. I learned from this experience that some people will never pay, and some will. I'm not opposed to alienating people who won't support all of the time, effort, and money I put into this product. It's always surprising to me when devs are surprised by outrage at the change/removal of a free product. There is a non-negligible cost for a user to research/choose/setup/learn a new tool. In this case, a feed reader has favorited articles, read/unread state of articles, etc. When you pull the rug out from users that have made that investment who now have to start over, they are going to be mad, regardless of what they paid.
- mjibson 12y ago
  The software is free. They can just run their own. It takes about 5 minutes of one-time setup. I wasn't taking away anything they couldn't already get for free and with minimal effort.
  - dave84 12y ago
    That's not realistic at all. Maybe for the average HN reader, but not for average users, even RSS savvy ones. I know plenty of people who use RSS that wouldn't be able to check if Python is in their PATH as per your instructions. Unless there's some friendlier instructions that I'm not seeing.
    - rodgerd 12y ago
      Then maybe if it's too hard it's worth paying for. I am always surprised (and dismayed) and the grotesque sense of entitlement engendered in people that they expect everything to be free, all the time, forever.
      - dave84 12y ago
        I agree completely, I was just offering a reason as to why people were reacting the way they were and that saying they lost nothing is just plain wrong.
tantalor 12y ago
> number of users is not a factor for Go Read You could charge users a fee per feed proportional to server cost (e.g., frequency of posts) and inversely proportional to the number of subscribers. * Unpopular/infrequent feeds (like my friends' blogs) would be free * Popular/infrequent and unpopular/frequent feeds would be cheap, maybe $1/year/user/feed * Popular/frequent feeds would cost more, maybe $10/year/user/feed This way you can peg your income to an exact multiple of your costs.
- swombat 12y ago
  That's pretty awful from the user point of view though. It's bad enough to have to pay - much worse to pay a randomly fluctuating amount and feel like you need to count your pennies every time you add a feed to your reader. Definitely would not advise this model for a feed reader.
st3fan 12y ago
I understand how app engine takes away a lot of pain wrt data storage, uptime, etc. But, $600+ is a lot of money. You can get a good number of very decent servers for that kind of money. If you are not afraid of managing your own data, I think hosting stuff on virtual servers is way more cost effective.
edavis 12y ago
Great stuff, Matt. I've always wanted to build something in the RSS space that could net me some extra cash. Write-ups like this let me know it's not a totally hopeless idea! As for optimizing when to check for new feed items, I recently moved to the "moving average" strategy described here [1] for my personal feed reader [2]. Overall, more active feeds have really benefited from it while I still need to tweak the algorithm for less active feeds, I think. Here's to another successful year for Go Read! [1] http://www.rn.inf.tu-dresden.de/uploads/publikationen/feedpaper_poster.pdf http://www.rn.inf.tu-dresden.de/uploads/publikationen/feedpa... [2] https://github.com/edavis/riverpy https://github.com/edavis/riverpy
kristianp 12y ago
Interesting that this article was written in March, about a week before google announced approximately %30 price-drops across its cloud offerings. I would have been interested to see the statistics for this year too, I don't think the chart tells us much about the sustained success (or otherwise) of your subscription model, due to only showing the 2 months after the introduction of subscriptions. The 2 months show rapid drop in income, has it stabilised this year? I'm wondering, for the icons or other cacheable content, have you thought of using cloudflare or similar? What are your costs going to be this month, after getting onto the HN front page again? After giving it a try, I noticed that this text is quite out of date now: We've just released! Read the blog post about it.
donniezazen 12y ago
Are there ways to get full articles of HN posts[1] through RSS? [1]news.ycombinator.com/rss
Xorlev 12y ago
Small bit of feedback: I'd love to see pricing for Goread before I go ahead and sign up. From the landing page, it's not even clear the project is active or that it costs any money. That might be a good way to increase revenue.
- mattlutze 12y ago
  That's a big one. It should be part of the pitch, can even be after the screenshot on the front page. E.g., "Sign in a give it a try for the next 30 days. If you like what we've built, the subscription is only $3/Mo or $30/Year (we'll give you 2 mo free for making that commitment)". Or something like that. It would have bugged me if I hadn't read that there was a subscription and came upon the Account page while perusing.

189 points by kasbah 12y ago

Congratulations on an income-generating project! That's an immense achievement. Perhaps the infrastructure cost is worth the headaches you spare yourself by being on GAE but have you looked at dedicated infrastructure from the likes of OVH/Hetzner (on both providers you can get ~2TB storage/64GB mem boxes for around $100/mo)? I moved all my projects to a single OVH box and it's been a champ. It does mean slightly more maintenance burden (ex you need to roll your own backup/restore plan). Perhaps it is a poor fit but that seems like a possible path to get those costs way under control

greendata 12y ago
Have to agree. Great article but it just confirmed my decision to stay away from app engine. What's the purpose of paying for something that's both harder to use and more costly than a traditional server? Datastore is great but I can get the benefits at a quarter of the price. At least with Heroku you have something that's easier to use.

jshen 12y ago

"Second, it is impossible to meet Google's terms of service with an RSS reader. They dictate that ads may not be shown along adult or copyrighted content. Determining that for external sources of data was not going to happen. I got a few emails about violations and added a system to prevent ads on certain feeds. But I was playing whack-a-mole and it would never end. Eventually I made a mistake and they banned my site. I gave up on ads at this point." I've experienced this myself, and I'm hearing it more and more from others. Maybe this is a market need that is going unfulfilled.

jbooth 12y ago
There's a great company that used to be called AdSafe, now called Integral Ad Science, that offers a service to identify adult or other non-ad-friendly content. http://integralads.com/ http://integralads.com/ I don't think it'd be feasible to run an advertising company that was less strict on adult/copyrighted content. People that buy advertising are really risk-averse on that subject, they don't want to see a meme on twitter or whatever of their brand next to porn.
- jshen 12y ago
  Two things. 1) The content that got my site kicked off adsense was text only, and it was a girl writing about going skinny dipping. It was tamer than much of cable TV, but I'm guessing some word frequency algorithm thought it was more than that. We aren't talking ads showing up next to porn. The great frustration is that if you aren't a big player, google doesn't give a shit and maybe they will turn your ads back on, maybe they won't. I'm guessing there are a lot of people out there that would jump on any ad network that didn't make you fear this all of the time. 2) My assumption, and I could be wrong about this, is that there are a lot of companies willing to advertise that aren't as paranoid. They may be able to pay less per click for the same quality of traffic, due to less competition for opening up to content that is less than PG
  - jbooth 12y ago
    RE: 2), the difficulty there is that you're now chasing the long tail of small dollars in a high-initial-touch business. Maybe a self-serve model could work, but the big corps and ad agencies representing the big money in the market are really really big on the brand safety thing. I'm not saying they're right, but as long as they're the ones signing the big checks, they don't really have to be. I guess a self-serve business would be possible, but since your costs are the same for non-sketchy (for whatever silly definition of sketchy) content, you basically become a remarketer for the content that everyone else doesn't want to advertise on. You can sell it, sure, but it's a hard pitch.
    - jshen 12y ago
      I'm sure you're right, which is why I'm moving away from ads. The examples that give me some sliver of hope are reddit and tumblr, both of which have some form of ads.
      - jbooth 12y ago
        Well, you'd think that Google could pro-actively not show ads on occasional 'bad' content rather than putting it on each individual website operator to avoid displaying the adsense iframe (or whatever it is) on content that might bother Google. They're already identifying it.. why not just not show the ad? And then only penalize accounts that have a really big % of unadvertisable content.

zura 12y ago

Btw, what are some good options nowadays for [almost] free website launch? Until/(if ever) you get "big" of course...

noblethrasher 12y ago
AppHarbor (a YC company) is nice for .NET stuff. It's free unless you want a custom domain, in which case it's only $10/month.
ansimionescu 12y ago
For static websites, Github Pages is free, nearlyfreespeech is very cheap. For full-blown web apps, didn't you hear the guy? GAE has a pretty generous free tier to test out stuff. So does Heroku, and it's way more user friendly. I still prefer GAE because I can use Google's tools. If you want to rent instances, you're going to have to pay from the beginning afaik. AWS and GCE are the usual suspects here. https://pages.github.com/ https://pages.github.com/ https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/ https://developers.google.com/appengine/ https://developers.google.com/appengine/ http://heroku.com/ http://heroku.com/
- zura 12y ago
  GAE looks interesting, but the main downside is that there is no free plan for SQL database (SQL Cloud service).
  - ansimionescu 12y ago
    I didn't use GAE that much, I only know that whenever I needed to try something for free, Heroku's plugin architecture comes in handy, since most addons have free tiers. They even support neo4j, an amazing graph database I just started playing with (and it's in beta, so they give a shitload of space for free).
syjer 12y ago
I'm using the free tier of openshift from red hat. The performance is good enough that I'm able to cram a java application powered by jetty + mysql + phpmyadmin in a single small "gear" (they give you 3 small gears free, 1gb of hard disk).

bueno 12y ago

Great read. This is especially interesting to me. My side project http://www.longboxed.com http://www.longboxed.com was recently launched to a modicum of regular users (~300). My app runs on Heroku on the free tier with the 'Hobby Basic' level of the Heroku Postgres database. All told it costs me ~9 dollars a month. No big deal. However, if I ever stepped the site up to another tier I'd be looking at ~50 bucks for the database and ~36 bucks for another process instance. These expenses can add up fast for a site that doesn't currently generate any money. Anyway - it is nice to see examples of introducing a pay model into your app after it has launched.

heliostatic 12y ago
Congratulations on launching. I've been following your development on tumblr and it's been great seeing your process.

hatelibs 12y ago

Published: 13 Mar 2014

simonbrown 12y ago

Did you consider grandfathering existing users in?

m_coder 12y ago
It seemed that he was trying to move the existing users from costing him money to at least a break even situation. In this case grandfathering existing users would have propagated a negative cash flow.

rootuid 12y ago

Nice article. Thanks for sharing! btw: Lots of typos in the article, be sure to spell check !

couchand 12y ago

FWIW, original lack of discussion [0] and [1]... [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7402393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7402393 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408089 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7408089

clarky07 12y ago
I actually find this very interesting. How days and times and luck plays such a role. And submitter... Having the same exact article submitted 3 different times and getting 2 votes, 4 votes, and then #1 front page. That's interesting.
- kasbah 12y ago
  I have no idea why this took off. I just thought I'd try and re-post it as I really like goread.io and the blogpost. I don't think the submitter matters. Maybe a little if people see that it's self promotion. But there is plenty self-promotion on the front page. More of a timing and luck thing I think.

BitMastro 12y ago

I would like to thank you for creating go read and making it open source, it's what I use as RSS reader, using my own free quota of App Engine. I hope I can contribute back some day. "30-day trial: This action cost me about 90% of my users. Many were angry and cursed at me on twitter. I agree that it is sad I did not say I was going to charge from the beginning, but I didn't know that I would be paying hundreds of dollars per month either." Honestly I think the sense of entitlement nowadays is way too high, people use a product that is free and needed weeks or months of your own free time, and then complain about it when you change it. If you decide to charge for it, you're a greedy bastard, instead if it's free, they say "if you aren't paying, you are the product". Other complain that the product doesn't work, when instead it's a case of PEBCAK. When it's not, it means you're going to say goodbye to a couple of night's sleep or a weekend or too, or maybe it's ONE feature away from being perfect (again). ...sometimes I hate people :(

Ntrails 12y ago
People get to be mad (within reason) when a free service stops being free without prior warning. Because they too invested time and effort in a product, making it part of their life, only to have that wasted when terms change. That is not to say, in any way, that you shouldn't charge - but don't expect users of a free application to change to a pay to use model en masse. Unless, of course, you don't have any competitors who do a similar thing for free...
- BitMastro 12y ago
  True, but be polite about it: "Sorry, I'm disappointed because my expectations differ from yours. I'll found an alternative. Good luck with your project"
- deeviant 12y ago
  Having to pay a few dollars a month is hardly a trigger for calling something "wasted"... In my own humble opinion.
MrMeker 12y ago
"Honestly I think the sense of entitlement nowadays is way too high, people use a product that is free and needed weeks or months of your own free time" How is he going to recoup anything for his time if you use his product in a way he can't charge for?

alec 12y ago

Interesting writeup, thanks. I'm a user and have been negatively impacted by the feed fetching optimizations - daily feeds are often a few days behind and come in bunches. Two examples: - Penny Arcade updates its comics Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, always at 7:01AM UTC, and then news other times during the week. It's Wednesday at 4:25PM UTC - 9 hours after - and goread hasn't picked it up. - Dinosaur Comics is updated weekdays. I'll eventually get all of them, but usually two or three at a time. For example, yesterday I marked all my feeds as read; today, I have entries from Monday and Tuesday, but not from Wednesday. I had hoped that the move to the everyone-pays model would give you the resources (either developer or quota) to fix these issues, but they've gotten no better or maybe worse. I haven't looked at what you're doing, but I believe Google Reader used pubsubhubbub where available to reduce/eliminate polling for many popular feeds. I honestly didn't have a great experience with my last bug report, so I haven't tried again.

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mjibson 12y ago
goread has pubsubhubbub support. penny arcade doesn't use it, though. The penny arcade feeds are indeed giving errors. I'll look into those.
- ecesena 12y ago
  At Theneeds we use a "sliding windows" approach to deal with polling. Say you run the scraper every hour. Each feed F_i is scraped once every n_i polls. If the feed returns more than his average news, then n_i gets decreased, while if the feed returns no news, it gets increased. Perhaps with a similar trick you can run your scraper more frequently on some feeds, still keeping the cost under control.
- alec 12y ago
  Thanks! I don't really know when the website has a problem, when goread has a problem, and when I have a problem, so I end up assuming that it's goread problem. I like how the desktop web version gives a "last refreshed" and "next refreshed" indication.

grey-area 12y ago

I wonder if the author has costed out how much running this app would cost using a VPS provider like Linode or Digital Ocean? You can get a lot of resources for under $100 a month and the needs of most apps are pretty basic (file storage+db+web server). Given the memory requirements and speed of Go, it shouldn't take much hardware to serve a lot of requests with a few go instances behind nginx say. I'm not convinced that being locked in to one cloud provider's services and APIs is healthy long term - it means you are locked in to that ecosystem and it's harder to consider alternatives, even if your needs are quite straightforward, so you can end up in a situation where you're paying hundreds of dollars a month for hosting when you don't need to be.

mjibson 12y ago
What about the datastore? I can get thousands of requests per second (which I did when I released and it hit HN), and the site was as fast as if I had 1 hit per second. Traditional databases don't scale like that. If you want it to scale like that, it gets difficult and expensive. The datastore does all of this + multi datacenter replication + predictive performance regardless of load.
- ccorda 12y ago
  Matt, you might want to look at DynamoDB, which would at least let you do a cost comparison to an AWS stack. This tweet from former AppEngine dev Brett Slatkin caught my eye: https://twitter.com/haxor/status/411351463806263296 https://twitter.com/haxor/status/411351463806263296 I still think Dynamo has a ways to catch up in terms ease of use to GAE, but it provides the performance, scalability, and replication like datastore.
- grey-area 12y ago
  If you're caching feeds, would you require thousands of requests to the db per second, or just thousands of web requests? It'd be an interesting test to try setting up a simple stack of psql/nginx/memcache and your go processes behind, and serving up the same data from it, to see what sort of performance you get, but I understand why you wouldn't bother if your app is somewhat tied in to the datastore already and works fine for you as is. Just out of interest, did you start on something else and move over to Google App Engine for performance, or start there?

revorad 12y ago

Congrats Matt. Well done on testing various revenue options, instead of eating the costs just to be the "nice guy", only to have to shut it down eventually. Ruben Gamez of Bidsketch had a similar story about switching from freemium to paid only - http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-work/ http://www.softwarebyrob.com/2010/08/18/why-free-plans-dont-...

superduper33 12y ago

Careface.

programminggeek 12y ago

I'm actually a little surprised it costs so much to run on app engine. Given that you've settled into a more predictable user model in terms of costs and probably growth, why not lower your costs by investing in dedicated server space or possibly reserved instances on AWS (unless there is a app engine equivalent). Without knowing what your server load looks like, I would imagine you could save a couple hundred dollars a month in hosting, which would go right to your bottom line profit. A couple hundred dollars a month isn't huge, but at this point in your business that's say $2,400 a year. From the looks of it, that's at least 2-3 months worth of revenue or almost 5 months worth of profit. I think it's at least worth considering with where your project is at right now.

mjibson 12y ago
AWS doesn't have the datastore. From the article: "When you compare to AWS prices, no one mentions the datastore."
- programminggeek 12y ago
  Yeah, I totally get that, but I guess I don't know what part of the Google AppEngine data store that works better or is a better fit than Amazon's DynamoDB, or running your own MongoDB or CouchDB or Hbase or Cassandra or whatever. What does Google's datastore do that makes it worth sticking to and paying more for.
- wasd 12y ago
  Excuse my naivety but isn't data store just a managed nosql database? You could switch over to Google Cloud (AWS but from Google) and still use Data Store or you could switch to any PaaS and use something like mongohq.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Excuse my naivety but isn't data store just a managed nosql database? Yes, so what? Its still something you need to cost out for an alternative. > You could switch over to Google Cloud (AWS but from Google) App Engine is part of Google Cloud (the AWS-equivalent umbrella of offerings). You probably mean "Google Compute Engine" instead of "Google Cloud" and "EC2" instead of "AWS". > and still use Data Store You could (Google Cloud Datastore seems to be very much the App Engine datastore outside of App Engine) but its then a separate cost you have to include in the comparison. > or you could switch to any PaaS and use something like mongohq You could, but its then a separate cost you have to include in the comparison.

curiousDog 12y ago

From the article: "A simple rule in computers is to make something run faster, have it do less work. I remember reading about how grep works quickly. Instead of splitting a file by lines and then searching for the string, it searches for the string, then finds the newlines on either side. Thus, if a file has no matches, it won't ever have to do the work for line splitting. Done the naive way, it would always split by line even if there was no match. Do less work." Good observation, but I doubt if that's remotely even the reason why grep works quickly.

akavel 12y ago
Um, like, it is: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-August/019310.html http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Augu... still, see also: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.html http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/old-age-and-treachery.h...
- curiousDog 12y ago
  I have seen those and those were what I was implicitly referring to. And if you did read them,"- Don't look for newlines in the input until after you've found a match." is just one of them but not the major contributor for speed. It's Boyer-Moore.
  - akavel 12y ago
    Hm, there seems to be written like so there: > Moreover, GNU grep AVOIDS BREAKING THE INPUT INTO LINES. Looking for newlines would slow grep down by a factor of several times, because to find the newlines it would have to look at every byte! (italics added, but uppercase original!) On my reading this sounds quite huge; I seem to understand the gist is that it's still a significant gain after Boyer-Moore. But, whatever.

pg_is_a_butt 12y ago

Go Read: using line charts instead of bar charts to misrepresent monthly earnings

psankar 12y ago

A long time user of your app, but from my own quota of appengine. Thank you for such a lovely product. Someday I would like to contribute to your project(s) more.

hueving 12y ago

>Again, it's free software so I'm not sure what the problem is. I learned from this experience that some people will never pay, and some will. I'm not opposed to alienating people who won't support all of the time, effort, and money I put into this product. It's always surprising to me when devs are surprised by outrage at the change/removal of a free product. There is a non-negligible cost for a user to research/choose/setup/learn a new tool. In this case, a feed reader has favorited articles, read/unread state of articles, etc. When you pull the rug out from users that have made that investment who now have to start over, they are going to be mad, regardless of what they paid.

mjibson 12y ago
The software is free. They can just run their own. It takes about 5 minutes of one-time setup. I wasn't taking away anything they couldn't already get for free and with minimal effort.
- dave84 12y ago
  That's not realistic at all. Maybe for the average HN reader, but not for average users, even RSS savvy ones. I know plenty of people who use RSS that wouldn't be able to check if Python is in their PATH as per your instructions. Unless there's some friendlier instructions that I'm not seeing.
  - rodgerd 12y ago
    Then maybe if it's too hard it's worth paying for. I am always surprised (and dismayed) and the grotesque sense of entitlement engendered in people that they expect everything to be free, all the time, forever.
    - dave84 12y ago
      I agree completely, I was just offering a reason as to why people were reacting the way they were and that saying they lost nothing is just plain wrong.

tantalor 12y ago

> number of users is not a factor for Go Read You could charge users a fee per feed proportional to server cost (e.g., frequency of posts) and inversely proportional to the number of subscribers. * Unpopular/infrequent feeds (like my friends' blogs) would be free * Popular/infrequent and unpopular/frequent feeds would be cheap, maybe $1/year/user/feed * Popular/frequent feeds would cost more, maybe $10/year/user/feed This way you can peg your income to an exact multiple of your costs.

swombat 12y ago
That's pretty awful from the user point of view though. It's bad enough to have to pay - much worse to pay a randomly fluctuating amount and feel like you need to count your pennies every time you add a feed to your reader. Definitely would not advise this model for a feed reader.

st3fan 12y ago

I understand how app engine takes away a lot of pain wrt data storage, uptime, etc. But, $600+ is a lot of money. You can get a good number of very decent servers for that kind of money. If you are not afraid of managing your own data, I think hosting stuff on virtual servers is way more cost effective.

edavis 12y ago

Great stuff, Matt. I've always wanted to build something in the RSS space that could net me some extra cash. Write-ups like this let me know it's not a totally hopeless idea! As for optimizing when to check for new feed items, I recently moved to the "moving average" strategy described here [1] for my personal feed reader [2]. Overall, more active feeds have really benefited from it while I still need to tweak the algorithm for less active feeds, I think. Here's to another successful year for Go Read! [1] http://www.rn.inf.tu-dresden.de/uploads/publikationen/feedpaper_poster.pdf http://www.rn.inf.tu-dresden.de/uploads/publikationen/feedpa... [2] https://github.com/edavis/riverpy https://github.com/edavis/riverpy

kristianp 12y ago

Interesting that this article was written in March, about a week before google announced approximately %30 price-drops across its cloud offerings. I would have been interested to see the statistics for this year too, I don't think the chart tells us much about the sustained success (or otherwise) of your subscription model, due to only showing the 2 months after the introduction of subscriptions. The 2 months show rapid drop in income, has it stabilised this year? I'm wondering, for the icons or other cacheable content, have you thought of using cloudflare or similar? What are your costs going to be this month, after getting onto the HN front page again? After giving it a try, I noticed that this text is quite out of date now: We've just released! Read the blog post about it.

donniezazen 12y ago

Are there ways to get full articles of HN posts[1] through RSS? [1]news.ycombinator.com/rss

Xorlev 12y ago

Small bit of feedback: I'd love to see pricing for Goread before I go ahead and sign up. From the landing page, it's not even clear the project is active or that it costs any money. That might be a good way to increase revenue.

mattlutze 12y ago
That's a big one. It should be part of the pitch, can even be after the screenshot on the front page. E.g., "Sign in a give it a try for the next 30 days. If you like what we've built, the subscription is only $3/Mo or $30/Year (we'll give you 2 mo free for making that commitment)". Or something like that. It would have bugged me if I hadn't read that there was a subscription and came upon the Account page while perusing.