Running an open source app: Usage, costs and community donations

(spliit.app)

260 points scastiel | 1 comments | 18 Oct 24 14:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.331s | source

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Dachande663 ◴[18 Oct 24 14:51 UTC] No.41879983[source]▶

I love the idea of this but, given the traffic numbers, this could run on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet and have the same result. They've burnt over a grand just to use vercel. Maybe I'm just older but I don't understand the logic here. A basic VPS, setup once, would have the same result and would be neutral in cost (it's how I run my own little free apps). Maybe the author is lucky enough that $100/mo doesn't really affect them or they're happy for it to pay for the convenience (my assumption).

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scastiel ◴[18 Oct 24 14:53 UTC] No.41880001[source]▶

>>41879983 #

Running a database accessed that many times on a $4 Digital Ocean droplet? I'd be very curious to see that ;)

The web hosting costs basically nothing. Most of the cost comes from the database.

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1. fs0c13ty00 ◴[18 Oct 24 15:47 UTC] No.41880501[source]▶

>>41880001 #

My open source service, lrclib.net, handles approximately 200 requests per second at peak (yes you read that right, it's approximately 12000 requests per minute) on a simple €13 Hetzner cloud server (4 AMD based VCPU, 8GB RAM). I'd love to write a blog post about how I made it possible sometime in the future, but basically, I cheated by using Rust together with SQLite3 and some caching.

I was surprised by the cost of Vercel in that blog post too, which is why I dislike all kinds of serverless/lambda/managed services. For me, having a dozen people subscribing to $1-$2/month sponsorship on GitHub Sponsors is enough to cover all the costs. Even if no one donates, I’d still have no trouble keeping the project running on my own.

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