[codingdave]

If it is working for you, that is great, but...

Death is not the only reason people quit working on a project. They could get a better offer, their family situation could change, they could get sick or injured, or they could simply get sick of it, just to name a few.

Also, keeping a SaaS online does cost money. And those costs increase as you scale. If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too small for me to have confidence that you are sticking around.

[horsawlarway]

> If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too small for me to have confidence that you are sticking around.

There's a lot of truth in this. Particularly since the free tiers on most cloud providers are explicitly designed to suck you in, then raise the rates tremendously as you scale.

A business that might be fine with 100 customers on the cloud could struggle mightily to cover the costs of dealing with 1000 customers on the same stack. The linear revenue growth doesn't match up to the insane cost increase as you go from "hobby project" to "small business" in the cloud.

[vbezhenar]

Can you provide examples where linear growth in resource consumption does not reflect on linear growth in clouds? So far all free tiers that I saw were trivial in cost savings and anything after free tier was pretty linear (or even big scales allowed to save something).

[horsawlarway]

> Can you provide examples where linear growth in resource consumption does not reflect on linear growth in clouds?

Sure - you were hosting your DB just fine with 100 customers using standard SSD, but now at 1000 you're blowing your IOPS budget and need to upgrade to premium SSD. The premium SSD costs twice what the standard SSD does for the same space - your usage will not have doubled.

Or - god help you, you were hosting your db just fine with 100 customers using a small VM, and to avoid having to think about it, you've decided to move from a self-managed db on a VM to something like Cosmos DB. No growth in usage at all from you, but your costs are about to shoot way up.

Or - I've added a customer in a region that has poor connectivity to my current region of choice - oops, setting up edge services closer to them is going to hurt. Now I'm sending data between regions, incurring all sorts of costs between services that I wasn't with a single region setup.

----

My experience with the cloud (and I've been a heavy user of both Azure and AWS, not as much GCP) is this: There are bands of costs, within that band, costs will tend to grow linearly as you grow.

The problem, is that you will outgrow the band you're in. There is a hard limit on something that you weren't thinking about (IOPS, for example) and once you hit that you have to jump to a different band with a new cost structure.

Usually, that means increasing base spend by a large amount compared to usage, and then getting slightly better cost/use at the new higher base.

[swebdev]

Sure, check AWS Cloudfront pricing.

[thsijustin]

Meanwhile 80% of the previous generations Fortune 500 are gone.

Everything dies. This simple minded confidence game we require each other play to validate usefulness is getting old.

You’re one of seven billion humans who will die, one of millions of programmers to pick from to prop up trade of Daddy Dollars.

You’re not sticking around either and cannot prove your contributions were truly more valuable than anyone else’s (models have been built to ascertain which human leadership traits and which technology make us more productive and all became too complex to understand).

Don’t blink though; keep pretending we’re onto something with folksy anecdotes, and nostalgia for past wins.

[imdsm]

So long as you're profitable, the revenue should scale too, covering the costs. It's a different approach when you're a solopreneur as you won't be burning money to try to scale rapidly. That being said, there are other risks, like the service being acquired and assimilated, but we face that with all services we rely on really.

[csomar]

I think that's why he's charging extra. If you are making a reasonable living from your bootstrapped SaaS, you'll probably keep at it.

[chadash]

> Also, keeping a SaaS online does cost money. And those costs increase as you scale. If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too small for me to have confidence that you are sticking around.

Sure, it depends on what you are doing, but I imagine that for most paid SAAS models, the cost of cloud computing is a small fraction of what they bring in revenue. In many cases, so small as to be effectively $0. As an example, stack overflow gets hundreds of millions of visits a month, but is run on two physical servers (plus an additional two for backup). As a more personal example, I have a small SAAS side project and my server costs run me about 0.5% of my revenue (the rest is all profit other than the value of my time). I could probably get that down to 0.1% with some code refactoring, but even with the current code, I could easily 10x my number of subscribers and not increase server costs by even $0.01.

To add to this, in my experience, the companies I've worked for have tons of extra capacity with their cloud services. For example, using t3.large vs t3.small instances at 4x the price indiscriminately. Why? Because server costs are just a rounding error compared to paying a bunch of $100k+ salaries.

[rovr138]

Unless they decide to turn it off, they would just stagnate in features.

Regarding it costing money, yes, of course. But costs increases as users increase. If you're giving away your product for free, that's an issue. If you're charging, then I don't see the problem.

[jjav]

> If you are small enough that you can run on a free tier, you are too small for me to have confidence that you are sticking around.

AWS has a free tier, so I wouldn't apply that rule too much.

[mbostleman]

And also, keeping a SaaS online isn't the only effort involved in keeping it stable, useful, and relevant.