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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: 0.195s | 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]▶
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. codazoda ◴[18 Oct 24 16:56 UTC] No.41881238[source]▶
I think it would be fine. I run a little private analytics service for my own websites. That service isn't as busy but handles ~11k requests per month. It logs to a SQLite database. It does this on a little Raspberry Pi 400 in my home office and it's not too busy. The CPU sits at 1% to 3% on average. Obviously there are a lot of differences in my setup but I would think you could handle 10x the traffic with a small VPS without any trouble at all.

You can read a little bit more about my analytics setup here:

https://joeldare.com/private-analtyics-and-my-raspberry-pi-4...