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Ha. Hahaha. How many apps at that scale have you run? Foursquare is on AWS[0] and serves 40 million users. Their monthly spend there is probably at least in the

Ha. Hahaha. How many apps at that scale have you run? Foursquare is on AWS[0] and serves 40 million users. Their monthly spend there is probably at least in the 10-20k range. And this is before even considering that they had 135 employees at the time[1] and swank offices in a hip neighborhood in NY. Making all that back with "ads", especially when your platform is almost completely on mobile, is not a cakewalk. 0: http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/foursquare/ http://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/foursquare/ 1: http://www.businessinsider.com/what-exactly-do-foursquares-135-employees-do-all-day-2012-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/what-exactly-do-foursquares-1...

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- juliangregorian 12y ago
  More armchair quarterbacking. You don't just pick up and move to save a buck when you have a whole company running on AWS' specialized architecture. There's a lot of process and a lot of overhead that factor into that consideration. A lifelong Mac user, for example, couldn't seamlessly jump into Windows just because "it's cheaper". Even if you ran on bare metal on colocation, I doubt you save more than 50%. That's time wasted that could be more fruitfully spent iterating on profitable ideas. Plus that's exactly why you took investment capital in the first place, so you didn't have to do all that fiddly stuff. It's always better to maximize revenue than to minimize costs. On that note, the cost of paying all those salaries is probably 10-50x the Amazon bill, but you can't really cheap out there either.
moe 12y ago
they had 135 employees at the time[1] and swank offices in a hip neighborhood in NY. Making all that back with "ads", especially when your platform is almost completely on mobile, is not a cakewalk. How about firing 120 employees and moving to a smaller office, just until you've figured out how to make money?
- deleted 12y ago
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- ulfw 12y ago
  Or why the need to grow to 135 employees with a checkin app for two mobile platforms? What do they all do and how is that aligned with the product at hand?
smackfu 12y ago
When the parent comment is asking "how much does it REALLY cost to run the site", I don't see how them having to pay for swanky offices is much of a rebuttal.
- juliangregorian 12y ago
  Not really, because for a lot of NY tech companies the office is a significant selling point for potential employees, and they do community events there that raise the brand's clout. Nobody wants to go work in a basement in Harlem when they can do the same work for Facebook and have a skylight and yoga balls.
achompas 12y ago
Given their location data and technology stack, I wouldn't be surprised if you've underestimated their spend by an order of magnitude (eg. $100-200k/month, ~$1.2-2.4M/year).
- juliangregorian 12y ago
  Yes, I think you're probably right. I noticed after the fact that they mentioned "hundreds of machines" and I was estimating more towards "dozens of machines".

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juliangregorian 12y ago
More armchair quarterbacking. You don't just pick up and move to save a buck when you have a whole company running on AWS' specialized architecture. There's a lot of process and a lot of overhead that factor into that consideration. A lifelong Mac user, for example, couldn't seamlessly jump into Windows just because "it's cheaper". Even if you ran on bare metal on colocation, I doubt you save more than 50%. That's time wasted that could be more fruitfully spent iterating on profitable ideas. Plus that's exactly why you took investment capital in the first place, so you didn't have to do all that fiddly stuff. It's always better to maximize revenue than to minimize costs. On that note, the cost of paying all those salaries is probably 10-50x the Amazon bill, but you can't really cheap out there either.

moe 12y ago

they had 135 employees at the time[1] and swank offices in a hip neighborhood in NY. Making all that back with "ads", especially when your platform is almost completely on mobile, is not a cakewalk. How about firing 120 employees and moving to a smaller office, just until you've figured out how to make money?

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ulfw 12y ago
Or why the need to grow to 135 employees with a checkin app for two mobile platforms? What do they all do and how is that aligned with the product at hand?

smackfu 12y ago

When the parent comment is asking "how much does it REALLY cost to run the site", I don't see how them having to pay for swanky offices is much of a rebuttal.

juliangregorian 12y ago
Not really, because for a lot of NY tech companies the office is a significant selling point for potential employees, and they do community events there that raise the brand's clout. Nobody wants to go work in a basement in Harlem when they can do the same work for Facebook and have a skylight and yoga balls.

achompas 12y ago

Given their location data and technology stack, I wouldn't be surprised if you've underestimated their spend by an order of magnitude (eg. $100-200k/month, ~$1.2-2.4M/year).

juliangregorian 12y ago
Yes, I think you're probably right. I noticed after the fact that they mentioned "hundreds of machines" and I was estimating more towards "dozens of machines".