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by humanistbot
1284 days ago
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I'm not a potential consumer of this service because I know enough to run my own sites, like most HNers I assume. But I am frequently asked by friends and family for help and advice on creating and hosting their own websites, like many HNers I assume. They need something that is easy to use without knowing how to code, for sure. But the most important thing they need something that will be maintained for the long-term and won't lead to them calling me in a panic if the people behind it eventually get bored, retire, die, go bankrupt, lose their keys, get hacked, or just decide it isn't worth the money or mental energy to keep hosting it for free. I see lots of discussion about feature comparisons to competitors like about.me, linktree, but for me, the critical component for this kind of product is the organization behind the product: do they commit to hosting the site indefinitely, and are they stable, mature, and trustworthy enough to follow through on that commitment? Does the organization behind the product have long-term financial sustainability, or is there a risk that they could fail like 90+% of startups fail? Is the organization notorious for suddenly sunsetting popular products for no good reason (see Google)? For example, I trust Microsoft to keep GitHub Pages running in its current form indefinitely (edit: or to sunset it with such advance notice that it won't be a crisis), although the me of 20 years ago would slap myself for saying this. I just don't trust what appears to be a single freelancer who has one active product in their resume. I've been that freelancer trying to build out a portfolio with free services like this. I regret it, and everyone who trusted me regretted it too. |
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There is no organization behind Veonid — it's just me who designed UI/UX and bootstrapped development of it. Currently, Veonid costs me $0 per month because services like Vercel, Hasura and Clerk are completely free to a certain extent. If there is more than 5000 monthly active users, it will cost just $25 per month for Clerk, and that price I can easily pay for 1-2 years without regretting. I plan to try to include some premium features in the next few months with a goal for Veonid make at least enough monthly income to pay for itself.
Of course, there is a risk of any app shutting and no guarantee that anything will remain for years and decades, but what I can say is I intend to keep Veonid hosting up for at least the next 12 months even if almost noone uses it. With more users, and especially if there are premium users at some point, I intend to keep it much longer.