Their hosting costs are crazy for such low usage (I assume since they say no one is being paid that the entirety of their expenses is marketing and tech and 25% of that is infra specifically, but it’s hard to tell since its last months and it’s possible that today they’re not being paid).

Regardless, too much expense for too little revenue.

People were paid until today, the costs are mostly salary

They say "As of today, none of us are being paid for our labor" -- I take that to mean they were drawing a salary previously, but aren't any more. Assuming the expenses include fully burdened salaries, I'd say the overall costs were understandable.

That's total expenses, not just hosting.

Nearly $300 seems a bit too rich for my blood - will definitely buy one second hand once I can get one for about $100.

Unsurprising - people don’t pay, and their audience is perhaps a bit more likely to use Adblock, not to mention the decline in news in general.

You’re getting downvoted but I agree. I didn’t see the value and stopped after a while of paying. It is sad that basically any comment that isn’t pro-Kagi is downvoted but I guess that’s the Reddit-ification of this site.

Most people who complain about Google don’t even use it properly (e.g. PSE).

A smaller competitor wants and advocates for itself. Makes sense but is it really surprising? It would be strange otherwise.

I do wonder how far one can get charging for search.

It’s really not. It’s just inconvenient.

The title and FTA are true but the economics for a startup is tricky.

One of the spectrum is true bare metal - setting up a data center, space, power, cooling and all of that.

Next step might be colocation.

The other end of the spectrum might be something like Firebase or DynamoDB. A step to the left from there might be Cloud Run, and then GKE.

It’s difficult to know how to spend your time and money as a function of the associated costs and maintenance.

Unfortunately from what I’ve seen the big clouds are a bit too expensive compared to the likes of Hetzner et al to just overprovision and forget about it.

I will say that it’s getting easier to have a self hosted set up that supports failover well with CockroachDB, TiDB and such.

The app side still needs refinement. Maintaining a k8s cluster on bare metal isn’t trivial.

You do not have to denormalize data to use dynamodb, just like how data doesn’t have to be normalized to use a relational DB.

Man people have no clue what they’re talking about lol

Your math is wrong… and it cannot be assumed that traffic is uniformly spread.

Finally what you’re saying is orthogonal to MongoDB - you can self host Mongo on a raspberry pi.