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

Re your question on saving costs: If you run it on a single Linux VPS, then I suspect you can get the costs down to 5-10$ per month.

One thing I find interesting is the growth chart: It's linear. But given that the app clearly has some traction, and is viral in nature, how come it isn't exponential?

Best I’ve been able to do is around $22 a month on DO, would love to hear alternatives that are cheaper

Hetzner my lord :)

Pi 5 + Cloudflare

I run a homelab that isn't too far from this, but I wouldn't recommend it without a few caveats/warnings:

- Don't host anything media-heavy (e.g. video streaming)

- Make sure you have reasonable upload speeds (probably 10+ Mbps min)

- Even behind Cloudflare, make sure you're comfortable with the security profile of what you're putting on the public internet

The min upload speed is mostly about making sure random internet users (or bots) don't saturate your home internet link.

I was thinking exactly this. I am the maintainer of ntfy.sh and my costs are $0 at the moment because DogotalOcean is paying for it 100% because it is open source. It would be around $100, though I must admit it's quite oversized. However, my volume is much much higher than what is described in the blog.

I suspect that the architecture can be improved to get the cost down.

Any guides or blogs on how to do that?

Same thought, I am absolutely blown away by how much vercel overcharges. I host a similar application on netcup (like hetzner) for 3$ per month, and when it was on HN, it easily handled over 10k requests per hour

Oh yeah definitely don't try this unless you have fiber and your ISP isn't too twitchy.

My suggestion is mainly for static site hosting since the Pi only needs to update the cloudflare cache when you make changes, and it should be able to handle a small db and few background services if you need them.

Loads, but it'll depend on what you want to do exactly. I think this should be the approximate list of things:

- domain at Cloudflare set up to cache requests (this will take the brunt of the site traffic)

- static IP at home (call your ISP)

- port forwarding on your router to the Pi for 80 and any other ports you need, maybe a vlan if you're feeling like isolating it

- a note on the Pi that says "don't unplug, critical infra"

- the same setup on the Pi as you'd do on a cloud server, ssh with key pairs, fail2ban, etc.

It usually never is exponential, see e.g. https://longform.asmartbear.com/exponential-growth/ that shows examples from "hypergrowth" companies where it's perceived these companies grew exponentially, but the growth actually followed a more quadratic form. About halfway through the article, the author shows another model that's more likely to fit these growth patterns: logistic growth. After initial rapid growth, followed by a period of linear growth, it eventually flattens out, indicating it's at "carrying capacity", or "market saturation".

DO is quite expensive, Vultr is solid, Hetzner is too and is even cheaper.