[notatoad]

it smells a little bloated

there's certainly operations that are leaner than that. a little down the thread there's people saying they could build bandcamp in a weekend, which is probably fanciful but also not completely off base. just on a pure technology level, bandcamp seems like a 3-4 developer sort of project. so they've got ~110 people running sales and support?

[kwertyoowiyop]

This is HN. Start a thread about anything and someone will say they could build it in a weekend. Completely off base.

[indigochill]

Counterpoint: https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/ already exists and is a self-hostable FOSS Bandcamp clone. Does it clone every feature? No. And it definitely has taken longer than a weekend to get to where it is. But it's a one-man passion project that clones enough to be a viable enough replacement for amateur musicians that I jumped to it immediately when Epic bought Bandcamp.

[_djo_]

While a very nice project, Faircamp doesn't come close to offering what Bandcamp does. It's self-hosted, requiring the artists to have the technical knowledge to both customise the platform and run the infrastructure themselves, and it doesn't support any payment options other than a barebones liberapay implementation.[0]

It's also most importantly not a single trusted entity that people can trust with their payments like Bandcamp is.

[0] https://simonrepp.com/faircamp/manual/payment.html

[iainctduncan]

Infra. The "non-functional" requirements are going to be expensive and need a solid team. Scaling, reliablility, availability, dealing with huge amounts of bandwidth and storage, all that crap. I'd guess a dozen infra people minimum.

[chongli]

Can’t you outsource all that to AWS? Bandcamp seems like an extremely simple site to me. It has some customizable artist pages, static file hosting for large music files, a web music player, and some e-commerce features for buying music.

I wouldn’t call it “one person and a weekend” simple, but the site has been around since 2007. A dozen people could have built it fairly comfortably from a basic site at the start to the scaled up version of today. 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me.

[iainctduncan]

Yes you can, but it gets very expensive in a hurry if you have a ton of load. So one justified place for head count is to bring down AWS bills. At the beginning, it makes sense to outsource it as much as possible, and later, a developer's salary to move the needle on your million dollar AWS bill is a no brainer.

I have no idea where they are in that scale of course.

[troupo]

> Can’t you outsource all that to AWS?

At a large enough scale you will still need a lot of people dealing with infra. AWS is not magic

> 118 people just sounds like “hiring for the sake of hiring” to me.

You'll need 20+ people just to deal with copyright issues on a daily basis.