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It's been a while since I shared my S3stat [1] numbers. I prefer to talk in vague handwavy terms rather than concrete numbers, but this should give a picture o
by jasonkester 12y ago
It's been a while since I shared my S3stat [1] numbers. I prefer to talk in vague handwavy terms rather than concrete numbers, but this should give a picture of the trajectory:
6 months: Regularly covering server expenses (which were ~$50-100/month at that point).
18 months: Would have paid for me to live nicely on the beach in Thailand.
30 months: Would cover my rent (and nothing else) at a nice apartment in a major city.
40 months: Passed the monthly take-home pay from my first (non-software) Engineering job out of college.
60 months: About what I'd have been making had I stuck with that first job out of college for 10 years.
80 months: Roughly a Senior Dev salary anywhere but the Bay Area.
As I noted a few years back for the first version of this list, this is for a SaaS subscription product that I built with the explicit goal of having a low-level income stream that I didn't have to put much time into. Early on, there were periods where I worked 80 hours or more per month to get the infrastructure ticking away to my satisfaction. These days, it requires maybe six hours of my attention each month.
This year, though, I've been back to full speed (meaning high single digit hours per week) building out and releasing a bunch of new features.
[1] https://www.s3stat.com/ https://www.s3stat.com/
- ohblahitsme 12y agoI'm curious to know how well your cheap bastard plan (https://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-plan https://www.s3stat.com/web-stats/cheap-bastard-plan) has been working out. Has it brought in some customers?
- jasonkester 12y agoQuite a few people have taken advantage of it, but less than you might think. It brings in some extra traffic, and the occasional new paying customer, so overall it does what it's supposed to. For the most part, the people who request the Cheap Bastard Plan don't have much in the way of traffic, so it's not particularly expensive to service them. Every once in a while I'll get a request from somebody who's a bit "cheap"'er than normal, asking for an upgrade after posting a comment to an online forum or blog entry, or even just a tweet. But for the most part people tend to have nice things to say about the product, and proceed to say them.
- chatmasta 12y agoIsn't this almost exactly what Google punished rap genius for doing?
- petercooper 12y agoNah. The Rap Genius representative was offering up a specific and unnatural chunk of HTML with numerous links to different areas of the site. The rules for that S3Stat plan says nothing about linking back at all, although of course you are naturally likely to. Not even in the same ballpark.
- snide 12y agoFantastic! Out of curiosity does anyone know of a similar service for Google Cloud Storage? Really bums me out that they don't break out bandwidth per bucket.
- danesparza 12y agoThis sounds like a great product idea. :-)
- cmhh 12y agohttps://qloudstat.com https://qloudstat.com seems to be doing some more services. do you think they do it as passive income as well?
- chatmasta 12y agoWow, very cool. I suspect this is a model that could be applied to a lot of scenarios where people want to feed raw data into a report and get some nice looking stats out. One possible application might be recurring revenue stats (growth, churn, etc). There are some solutions for this but they all depend on certain billing providers. Would be nice if you could just upload a .csv file of all your transactions, tag the columns, and get a nice report.