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How does the economics work with this?

* 21 engineers worked on it

* average salary 200K per year

* 18 months i.e 1.5 years

* 50% of the bandwidth

* 1x extra cost for all the pending features for next 3 years

so 21 * 200000 * 1.5 * 0.5 * 2 = 6.3 Million

* since they mentioned they were running largest instance in 2020, which is r5.24xlarge i.e 15.84 per hour

* they grew 100x from 2020

* assuming they went reserved instances, they would have gotten about 50% discount

* at this scale, they would have got atleast 20-30% enterprise commitment discount from aws, lets consider 25% discount

so 15.84 * 730 * 12 * 100 * 0.5 * 0.75 = 5.2 Million

if they were to go with planetscale and even if planetscale charges them 30% extra, i.e 6.76 Million, which means they are only saving about 1.56 Million per year, so it will take them atleast 4 years more to realise their cap-ex investment into building this in-house, not to mention all the extra maintainence outside the new features they are yet to implement, like reliability, observability, version upgrades etc,...

what am I missing?




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