
Soup.io Will Be Discontinued - codingminds
https://kitchen.soup.io/post/696483222/The-sadest-news-in-the-soup-history
======
JustARandomGuy
I see quite a few people in this thread blaming the high cost of AWS. I don't
understand, why is this a problem with AWS - isn't it a problem with
freeloading? Yes, moving hosting may save you some bucks, but fundamentally
isn't the problem the large number of freeloaders?

If even 5% of the 6 million users paid $20 a year, Soup would have $6 million
a year - more than enough to run a small company on.

FInally, i'll point to my favorite post on the subject, Don't be a free user
by idlewords:
[https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/](https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/)

~~~
reificator
> _FInally, i 'll point to my favorite post on the subject, Don't be a free
> user by idlewords:
> [https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/*](https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/*)

I used to believe this. Now Google Play Music is dead despite my $20/month.

~~~
topicseed
Dead? They just have two competing products, the older Google Play Music, and
the more modern YouTube Music. The app is dead, but the Music Streaming
Service by Google is still here, under a different name, and at a similar
price.

~~~
reificator
I've been watching the development of YouTube music for the last several years
knowing my preferred platform's days were numbered.

YouTube Music fills the needs of some, perhaps many users, but it is _not_ a
1:1 replacement and I'm not a fan of what they have to offer.

Also I hold a bit of resentment for YTM since the YouTube app no longer allows
backgrounding podcast-style content or playing it with the screen locked. It
tells you to go to YouTube Music instead but that's definitely not the right
UX for watching/listening to that kind of content.

~~~
qtplatypus
I am listening to a backgrounded YT content right no so I’m confused about
your comment.

~~~
explodingcamera
It's YouTube premium only

------
jlokier
They report 10k€ monthly costs and 1.5k€ revenue.

I may be full of it, but I'm fairly confident I could reduce their server
costs to below their revenue in a matter of days or weeks. 6 million users is
a lot, but it's not vast even if they have real-time connections and a lot of
storage.

I imagine that a lot of HN more experienced users could do the same.

Assuming I'm not full of it, that suggests soup.io could be marginally
profitable as long as nobody is paid to run it.

At 1.5k€ MRR, it would still have to be a labour of love for someone.

I couldn't afford to put in the time for free, but surely there are others who
can.

~~~
sosodev
Do you think they might have explored options to reduce costs before deciding
to discontinue the service?

~~~
scrollaway
I'm usually pretty quick to dismiss such claims as well but in this instance I
agree with GP jlokier. I do these kinds of massive emergency cost reductions
fairly often with my clients and there's always a story of the current
maintainers either missing some critical knowledge about what they're
currently using / could use instead; or simply massive tunnelvision.

Some key factors here:

\- Discontinuing _expensive_ parts of the product is better than discontinuing
the entire product.

\- I see the M word being thrown around and that… uh… potentially says
something.

\- "We're not open sourcing because the product is too complicated" is also
extremely telling.

\- VERY often, "I'll discontinue because I can't afford to run it anymore"
hides an underlying "I don't want to run it anymore"; one the maintainer
sometimes doesn't fully realize themselves. I've seen this a lot on GDPR day,
people shutting off services because it's "too expensive to comply". Talked to
a _bunch_ of them, and after a lot of chatting it always boils down to "This
will give me a much needed break from the stress of running this thing which
doesn't pay my rent, and I get to dodge the blame".

I'm going to go ahead and extend the offer GP can't make. soup.io maintainers,
if you're reading this, are indeed spending 10k+ EUR on infra, and do want to
keep your service alive and running, please reach out, I'll work pro bono. I
also have some good contacts in the archiving world if it comes to that.

~~~
monoideism
What "M" word?

~~~
scrollaway
Microservices ;)

------
ALittleLight
I'd not heard of this site before but I'm surprised they've got 6 million
users, 11k monthly server costs, and aren't profitable.

I clicked around for a few minutes and saw a lot of user activity and no ads.
If I owned the site, rather than trying to close, I'd just make every tenth
post in a feed be an ad.

That plus some actions to curtail server costs, depending on whatever their
high cost items are... Seems like you could probably monetize that userbase
somehow.

~~~
grumple
They are absolutely throwing away an easily monetizeable product here.

~~~
fit2rule
These kinds of solution are anathema to the Vienna hacker scene, which is
where soup.io was born. Never going to happen.

------
MattGaiser
I have to wonder. Could this be profitable if the costs of AWS were not so
casually hand waved away like many are prone to do?

People treat the cost of infrastructure as irrelevant as it should just be a
fraction of the costs, at least starting out. But there would be numerous
smaller opportunities which could be profitable if costs were managed
properly.

~~~
jarym
Well if AWS was the sole culprit then they could have spent time to migrate to
a Hetzner or OVH.

I think I read their revenues were 1500/mo - not nearly enough to pay for
running costs and a single founder salary.

~~~
TylerE
That's the real issue. Even if all costs are zero, €18k/yr really isn't that
much.

------
lloydatkinson
What is it? The site makes no effort to explain what it is or did.

~~~
pndy
It was a microblogging platform; it had a chance to become a worthy competitor
to tumblr from Europe but sadly, instead of gaining funding, it got spambots.
Over the last 10 years a devoted community managed to grow around the site -
it's hard to say how large in numbers but now it seems it wasn't enough to
keep service running.

~~~
VectorLock
Spammers really do ruin everything. The guy who acquired delicious says as
soon as he turned it back on after several years of read-only mode it
immediately started getting hammered by spambots again.
[https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1281285876388106247](https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1281285876388106247)

~~~
mrtksn
what’s so hard about keeping spambots out? not all sites seems to suffer from
spambots after all.

~~~
pndy
Site was always pretty much left alone beside serious issues like hardware
failure that wiped most of the content from 2016; my problem with being unable
to load and post within a particular group was never resolved (I was a member
and confirmed to never being on blacklist; obviously the group always loaded
within private mode without issues).

The simplicity of account registration, the possibility of creating sub-
profiles within main one (similar to tumblr) were probably the sources of
spambot thriving on soup. While we had post report and flagging features, only
ignoring was the best way of getting rid of all that trash.

------
urxvtcd
I wrote a very simple soup content downloader some time ago, you can get it
here: [https://github.com/urxvtcd/soup-io-
downloader](https://github.com/urxvtcd/soup-io-downloader)

It has some shortcomings, mainly content is saved under random file name
without extension. Hm, maybe I'll try to fix that now.

~~~
klaude
I'm afraid that they will be gone sooner if folks start to download their
contents in bulks :(

~~~
ikari_pl
What else can we do. What else.

Surprisingly enough, the assets are on an awesome CDN. Getting the HTMLs took
me ~8 hours. Getting 19 GB of images - maybe 10 minutes?

------
chubs
I posted the thoughts after another similar blogging service died, and I still
think it's relevant:

This is one of the main reasons I tried garnering interest around a blogging
app idea I had: If you write with a third party service such as soup.io,
eventually your writings will go away due to an acquihire, company shutdown,
merger, or 'it became too expensive to run' in this case. If you want to write
seriously with a multi-decade perspective, you need to host it yourself, and I
wanted to make that easy to manage for an average Joe. Unfortunately I haven't
had any luck gathering interest! Technical people understand the idea but just
roll their own using eg Jekyll; and Non-technical people don't get the idea,
or dont seem to care: they post on eg soup, their writings last a few years
then vanish, they shrug and move on. I worry that it's a cultural thing: Few
people care for the permanence of deep thoughts, and that's a big pity.

The idea is here:
[http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/](http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/)

Anyway if anyone has advice i'm all ears :)

~~~
dan1234
I wonder if the native app could use something like Terraform to manage the
hosting on the user’s behalf?

They’d need to register an account with a supported provider and do the
initial domain registration & dns pointing, but a step by step guide could be
made for that.

------
thestepafter
Why do software companies shut down like this instead of finding someone that
may be interested in taking it over? All I ever see are notifications of
services shutting down, many of them "labors of love" that have been around
for X years. Why not find someone that will take it over and keep your dream
alive?

~~~
jsnell
Handing over a site with user data requires a lot of trust in the new owner.
If they were not vetted and turn out anot good stewards of the data (e.g. end
up hacked with all the databases leaked, even if not actively malicious), some
of the moral culpability lies with original owners.

User data is toxic. It's your responsibility to make sure it gets disposed of
properly when winding down a failed venture.

~~~
rhizome
> _If they were not vetted and turn out anot good stewards of the data (e.g.
> end up hacked with all the databases leaked, even if not actively
> malicious), some of the moral culpability lies with original owners._

I appreciate your point, but I'm struck by the impression that this never
results in consequences.

~~~
jsnell
That's why I wrote the "moral" part there. I agree that it's basically
guaranteed there will be no legal consequences, but you'll still know it was
your fault.

~~~
rhizome
Capital is amoral, though. Which, I appreciate your point, but it's literally
not a term in any capitalist transaction. Ethics? There's a reason why people
make jokes about "Business Ethics" being the shortest class in any Business
major curriculum. You can advocate for inserting religion, PBCs, or any number
of "hey come on guyz" strategies, but none of it carries any significance. I'd
certainly like to hear of post-Industrial Revolution capitalists taking shame
or guilt into account.

~~~
vikramkr
Creators might have another venture they want to work on in the future. Being
seen as amoral could increase customer aquisition costs and lower lifetime NPV

------
lgats
Link is now taken down, but last I heard, they were selling the soup.io domain
for $40k [https://flippa.com/10566726-advertising-
entertainment](https://flippa.com/10566726-advertising-entertainment)

The owners listed the domain on flippa asking for 40k+ and stated they had an
existing offer of $40k and wanted to see if they could get a better offer from
flippa buyers.

update: minimal listing details are available from bing cache:
[https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3A%2F%2Fflippa.com%2...](https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3A%2F%2Fflippa.com%2F10566726-advertising-
entertainment&d=4972610080867914&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-
US&w=f-LLl3MirfbVSGwDnhAjoJstO7r7lxoM)

------
lilyball
Why is a site that has been around for 13 years announcing an abrupt closure
with a mere 10 days notice? If this is due to money (like they said) then they
could have predicted this significantly earlier and chosen to notify the
community with a more reasonable time frame.

------
jermier
This is why we need to scrape services like this and keep copies for
posterity. For every site like this that can't sustain itself well into the
future, a part of the Internet and its culture dies. RIP Soup.io

~~~
nojito
Who’s going to pay for that?

~~~
chewzerita
OP may have a different answer, but the Internet Archive[0] and the
/r/DataHoarder[1] communities are really obsessed with digital archival and
preservation. The latter has gone to great lengths to, well, _hoard_ anything
and everything imaginable that they can.

[0] [https://archive.org/](https://archive.org/)

[1]
[https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/](https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/)

~~~
surround
Doesn’t the Internet Archive have a collection of websites they backed up just
before they went down? Do they plan on backing up Soup.io? Do they even know
about it?

~~~
rzzzt
I think you are thinking of the Archive Team:
[https://www.archiveteam.org/](https://www.archiveteam.org/)

------
sigio
Reading posts like these always makes me wonder... how high are the costs of
running these setups... and wasn't there a way to get funding from the users
(and limit costs, so a low income would suffice)

~~~
themgt
They say here[0]: _We are currently paying near the 10,000€ mark per month and
our revenue streams are at 1,500€.

The infrastructure and micro-services of soup became more and more complex
over the years and the amount of data is huge, really huge. To serve nearly 6
million users is a resource-intensive duty.

This is also the reason why we dropped the idea of open-sourcing soup. It's
too complex to maintain and to hand-over._

Hard to know where the $ are exactly going, but $11k/month will buy you a lot
of server. Sounds like maybe just wasn't worth it given the revenue but I've
got to believe it could be rearchitected so at least the hosting portion was
profitable.

[0] [https://kitchen.soup.io/post/696542642/Thanks-for-your-
feedb...](https://kitchen.soup.io/post/696542642/Thanks-for-your-feedback)

~~~
momokoko
Let this be a lesson to people that rationalize AWS high cost as something
that won’t matter. If you have a low margin product like this, infrastructure
costs can sink you. This isn’t too say they were using AWS, just that
infrastructure cost is sometimes more important than development velocity.

~~~
csunbird
Egress costs of AWS are straight up robbery. 0.05 per GB (assuming you use
that much bandwidth, otherwise it is even higher) adds up very quickly when
you have a lot of users and page clicks.

------
unicornporn
So 10 days to let users get their data and Archive Team to do their thing?
Kind of shitty.

------
jarym
I hope no one sees this as insensitive but would they consider open sourcing
the platform? Might find a 2nd home amongst people that would self-host?

~~~
servercobra
On the latest post on their site:

> The infrastructure and micro-services of soup became more and more complex
> over the years and the amount of data is huge, really huge. To serve nearly
> 6 million users is a resource-intensive duty.

> This is also the reason why we dropped the idea of open-sourcing soup. It's
> too complex to maintain and to hand-over.

~~~
jarym
Missed that thanks. Sounds like their tech was too complicated to maintain
cost effectively.

However, that isn't a valid justification to not open-source the code.

I also read this comment on their blog 'We do this for free, invest our time
and money and try to keep this site up and running. So please don't insult us.
Instead you should donate to support us.'

Sounds like they weren't really running it like a business and didn't have
much idea on how to monetise it. Shame.

~~~
pantalaimon
Their tech was also notoriously unreliable to the point where I stopped using
the site because eventually it was more likely to find it not-working than
working.

This might have changed in recent years, but most users were already gone when
I last checked.

It's a pity because when it worked, it was a really great site and many people
I knew were on it.

------
ivalm
18k/year with 6 mil users is... 0.003 euro per user per year? Certainly even
running ads would meaningfully improve this.

~~~
nacs
I think the majority of those users aren't active.

I saw somewhere that only around 20K users are actually active.

~~~
ivalm
then why do you need 10k/month to support traffic for 20k users. Their numbers
really don't make sense on either side.

~~~
nacs
It doesn't sound right to me either. They claim 10K per month in just hosting
fees but the owner of Soup ("Euphoria hosting") is actually a hosting
business. Maybe they're charging themselves a bunch of money (perhaps as a tax
write off).

------
klaude
Haven't they tried donations? I think that users would throw some monies for
running their beloved service like soup. I think for such site it would be
better solution than paid accounts or even ads.

------
lentilslist
I know this is off-topic but since this startup is gone let's talk about their
domain name potential for a second.

A real soup startup could exist where outdoor (on plastic) pressure cooker
based temporary kitchen operations could create a monthly soup festival /
contest with pressure canning standards and inspectors on premises. It sounds
like a festival and not a technology company at first, and I admit that the
Atlanta Chili Cook-off (atlantachilicookoff.com) is similar, but imagine
something like this with an app designed to enable monthly soup distribution
teams who collect order forms during each cook-off type event. They could
deliver the soup through the app during each cook-off event or through the
mail.

Because soup is limited in how it is produced a standards based environment
(based on pressure cookers / canners) could enable swift build-outs of
kitchens on grass and plastic tarps each of which could utilize propane and
cook soup with a process that is designed to ease inspection through
conforming to a standard that the app explains. Food hygiene inspectors could
be present and essentially all kitchen processes could be better inspected
than any restaurant during this event (in theory) where massive amounts of
soup could be produced and then pressure canned. This could be a distribution
hub for homelessness if a donor model was included to help there be free cans
as well as a subscriber model so that each team could have a monthly recurring
revenue based on their popularity where they are doing everything during the
event except procuring ingredients from farmers markets and whatnot. You can
have a dozen pressure canners lined up next to each other and make a heck of a
lot of soup all at once unlike what you can do with bread, or many different
types of food. This should enable a new type of festival to exist.

Anyone could be a chef with this model if they knew their ingredients like
that back of their hand and they practiced with a pressure cooker at home
until they had it down pat. They could lease pressure canning and/or cooking
infrastructure during the event to reach their goals if they qualify in and
stay popular.

Please feel free to run with this idea if you think you can move it forward. I
simply am busy with other projects. Others have probably thought of this
before, and I'm probably missing something, but I'm just seeing what people
think.

------
classics2
What part of this site couldn’t be served off a laptop in a closet?

------
surround
Does archive.org plan on backing it up?

~~~
pndy
It's the last 9 days for soup until it finally boils out; users from what I
can see on discord are trying to backup their accounts with tools made by
other users and most of them seems to have troubles achieving that. Servers
were never particularly in a good shape - most of the times we could see 502
and 503 errors.

Amount of user posts, spambot trash would made rather pointless for achive.org
to scrap soup content, I believe

