It's quite cheap to run. It's just one small EC2 instance, and it's usually idling around a load average of 0.1 (though right now it's at 1, hehe). It costs me about $24/month. The Apple developer license costs $100 per year, so it's ~$400/year. As of recently, that's entirely covered by donations.
I am incredibly humbled by the sponsorships. I would have never thought ntfy would take off like that. I love open source and I promise it'll always be free and open (as long as I can reasonably fight of the abusers).
If I were to run my own personal instance of this that cost would be quite high. A free Oracle Cloud VM or $5 Digital Ocean droplet would be the way I go.
Yeah, I think that "or two" in "one or two kids" is still being litigated. My reading is that it'll stay in litigation indefinitely, as this is the price both companies agreed to pay when they decided to retain lawyers from Hell itself.
Well, of course. “$24 per month seems high for running my own personal instance that’s going to do a handful of notifications daily” vs “$24 per month seems high for running a public service that could very easily need to be scaled up quickly” are two very different statements.
I only have experience with Digital ocean and AWS. AWS free support is definitely much better than Digital Ocean. Also Digital Ocean is more quicker to delete your data than AWS in case of billing issue or anything.
In terms of open connections, it varies, but right now it's 5k active connections. But there are many many self-hosters out there, and the people using Firebase (no "instant delivery") are also not counted in that.
You can subscribe to the stats above using the https://ntfy.sh/stats topic (old messages are only cached for 12h, so half the day it shows up as empty)
You can probably cut down server cost by half. Have you tried with lower resources or have figured out a minimum requirement for the server? As an experiment I suggest - https://tinykvm.com/ - with FreeBSD or OpenBSD (Linux doesn't really do well with small amount of RAM).
Much appreciated my friend. I honestly didn't opt for the cheapest server because I wanted it to run well. I don't want to constantly fight for resources or worry about it. It was supposed to be fast and be able to handle traffic well.
And it is. It's not falling apart from the HN traffic and it has a lot of head room. Plus. It's doing 400k messages a day already easily.
Anyway. Thank you so much for your generosity. I am humbled and thankful for your support.
I think its because this is a hobby project and for a lot of people the cheaper a hobby project is the more they can keep running before the money runs out. It's also that for some people optimizing costs and making things run on as few resources as possible is fun.
But if you don't find it fun spending time performance optimizing to the extreme, and can afford it, then there's nothing quite like massively over-provisioning hardware. It makes a lot of performance and reliability problems go away.
Probably some truth to all you said. I spend way more money on my hobbies.
For this creator, his hobby is well into the realm of "could productize some component", even if just creating derivatives of this for some commercial purpose. I'd much rather spend time on that than the optimization part. My thought is HN has skewed more technical than entrepreneur over the years and the folks who are into the optimizations are more vocal in the thread. Could also just be the cohort of HN that was attracted to this article. "Send push notifications to your phone" sounds pretty technical. Or, the tech recession is changing mood about money and I'm not in tech.
I appreciate the dogged pursuit of efficiency, but spending a lot of time optimizing for the current scale and getting costs from $24 per month to $10 per month (or whatever) is likely wasted time if this grows significantly. You have to be able to recognize there’s a lower bound where your costs are low enough it doesn’t matter and even saving 75% isn’t worth thr effort. The author has obviously drawn that line somewhere above $24 per month and that’s perfectly reasonable.
That's a good point. I guess many of us were suggesting cheaper VPS because we assumed this is a new project, just launched. (Most inexperienced developers / start-ups tend to over provision). With current hosting technologies, it is quite easy to scale with need, with minimum downtime, so it makes sense to start with the minimum server requirement and then go for a powerful server as required. This give you valuable data on the bottlenecks (where you can do future optimizations), as you scale, while you temporarily fix the issue with more money (by requisitioning better servers) as you work out the cost-benefit analysis (as you did) of spending money on optimising vs server upgrade.
I love your work and admire your approach. But you should recognize a void will emerge and void get filled. Someone (probably reading this thread) will clone your idea and make it a supported for pay service.
It wont be me. But some enterprising engineer/pm/group who was recently laid off in this downturn will probably make a go of it.
