This crew seem to genuinely believe in their vision and clearly gave a lot of themselves to see it realized.
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This crew seem to genuinely believe in their vision and clearly gave a lot of themselves to see it realized. My heart goes out to them.
To the users who called this place home, as well.
~$42k/mo. for ~17k active users, though. Yikes.
cohost! - "cohost to shut down at end of 2024" https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down
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Joseph Szymborski :qcca:replied to Mick 🇨🇦 last edited by [email protected]
> "~$42k/mo. for ~17k active users, though. Yikes."
it's easy from the outside to feel this way, but one has to ask themselves "how the heck?!"
EDIT: Especially surprising they couldn't stay afloat after reading they had like $16K as income!
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M. Grégoirereplied to Joseph Szymborski :qcca: last edited by
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@mpjgregoire @jszym The correct answer is “less than the revenue generated by those users.”
Take a look at the financials of mstdn.ca as a point of comparison.
https://news.mstdn.ca/mastodon-canada-needs-your-help/
~5k mau and ~25k accounts. ~$1700 CAD/mo.
Not every cost will scale linearly - particularly I’d expect exponential CDN costs - but I’d bet we could engineer a stable Mastodon deployment for 17k users for well under $10k/mo.
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Joseph Szymborski :qcca:replied to M. Grégoire last edited by
@mpjgregoire @mick I mean, you're totally right, it's really hard from the outside in to tell, especially because I don't know their stack. So I'm trying to approach this from a perspective of humility, but also reconciling why this feels wrong.
It makes sense for start-ups vying from VC cash to take the approach of building a thing, waiting for it to get traction, and then try to raise cash off of that so they can scale.
But cohost's ethos really doesn't allow for VC funding...
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Mick 🇨🇦replied to Joseph Szymborski :qcca: last edited by
@jszym @mpjgregoire I went and found the apples I was comparing with our oranges:
https://cohost.org/staff/post/1690393-h1-2023-financial-up
Infrastructure-wise, they *were* spending about $10k/mo.
The rest of the monthly expense was payroll.
They have 5 full-time dev/ops/support people earning $95k/yr, trying to build and operate their product and make a living at it.
With this context, their costs seem very reasonable - though just as unsustainable, unfortunately.
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Joseph Szymborski :qcca:replied to Mick 🇨🇦 last edited by
@mick @mpjgregoire That context makes a whole lot more sense. Cheers!