from Hacker News

37signals $3M cloud bill breakdown

by beck5 on 1/12/23, 3:03 PM with 7 comments

• by brodouevencode on 1/12/23, 3:32 PM

  OpenSearch is notoriously expensive. I'll go further: any managed service at AWS is notoriously expensive.

  NAT Gateway? Expensive.

  Elasticache? Expensive.

  Sagemaker suite? Expensive.

  The list goes on. You're paying for a butt to be in a seat. I'd also like to see a breakdown of where they are spending money in S3. I've worked at places where the bill was $4m per month, so sometimes it amuses me when people complain about their (much) lower bills.

• by ksec on 1/12/23, 3:29 PM

  For a company that makes "tens of millions in annual profits " in 2020, this doesn't seems much at all.

  They had around 60 employees, which put the salary and expenses on employees close to 12M a year.

  Assuming the "tens" were minimum at 20M, their revenue would be around ~$35M.

• by powera on 1/12/23, 3:54 PM

  $3 million per year for a business of that size doesn't sound too obscene. DHH is forgetting that electricity, cooling, fault-tolerance are also expensive, the price of "insanely powerful iron you can buy from Dell" is not the whole story.

  Also, previously (October 2022) from DHH: https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...