

Tarsnap reaches profitability - cperciva
http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-03-09-tarsnap-reaches-profitability.html

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mdasen
I think it will be a little while before you're nicely profitable, but I'd say
it will come. Backups are just the worst thing ever. Getting the data to
unreliable tape drives, rotating the tapes, dealing with finite capacity
physical hardware, making sure that it's secure (both from people stealing the
data and disaster happening to the data). It's a nightmare and one that I'm
happy to replace with Tarsnap.

With Tarsnap, I can simply run a cron that creates a backup with the date in
the name and I'm done. I never have to eliminate old versions since they all
take the storage space of an incremental. I never have to worry about where
we're storing the tapes (a crappy basement a block from our main building
_shudder_ ). I never have to worry about people getting past the little
security in the building. Most importantly, I don't need to do anything. The
cron does it. I don't have to monitor tape capacity, constantly test whether
the tapes are any good, deal with incrementals vs. full backups, etc.

There's no longer any excuse for having poor backups. Tarsnap allows you to do
full backups as often as you want while only using the space of incremental.
It's paranoid secure and replicated on S3.

Congratulations! You deserve for this service to become the premier backup
solution for many IT departments.

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cperciva
Before anyone asks, I'm not going to say how much profit tarsnap made in
February, except to say that it's significantly less than I spent on insulin
(I'm a type 1 diabetic) -- I belong to the crazy set of people who get very
uncomfortable at discussions about income.

To be honest, I wouldn't have posted this at all, except for one important
thing -- the fact that tarsnap is self-supporting (as I mention in the post)
means that people have a much stronger reason to trust that it will continue
to exist in the future.

~~~
asb
Out of interest and on the topic of your personal profitability, do you get
any meaningful income from the AdSense on your daemonology.net pages?

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cperciva
Not recently. A couple of years ago I was getting around $4 CPM and $50/month
from Adsense; now it's more like $0.25 CPM and $10/month. It's at the point
where I'd remove the adsense except that I can't be bothered to edit all the
pages I put it onto.

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terpua
Congrats Colin for sticking with it for 2 years and even more amazing, being a
lone founder and remaining focused.

~~~
cperciva
Thanks! I must say, though, that staying focused on tarsnap has been easier
than staying focused on my doctorate was -- with tarsnap, I could see my code
improving long before tarsnap reached public beta, but for my doctorate, I
didn't start writing my thesis until the beginning of my third year.

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mixmax
Congratulations!

 _"What guarantee can I provide that the tarsnap service will continue to
operate?"_ \- lots of upstarts get this question, and rightfully so. I've been
wondering, would it be possible to set up some kind of foundation that would
take over the data if a company goes out of business? This way users can get
to their data, and port it to somewhere else, even if the company goes
bankrupt. If it is possible this would give a lot of potential customers one
less worry.

~~~
Andys
This is a really good idea, but sounds like a pain to set up.

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ryanwaggoner
I really hate to be an asshole about this, but I took a look at your pricing
model:

\- $0.30 / GB of bandwidth

\- $0.30 / GB / month of storage

From what I see, you could host this on AWS and be "profitable" with just one
customer, right? I mean, if your definition of profitability includes only
your variable non-staff costs, which seems to be how you're defining it...

~~~
cperciva
_From what I see, you could host this on AWS and be "profitable" with just one
customer, right?_

If EC2 instances were free, sure. :-)

~~~
ryanwaggoner
I'm assuming you're using S3 for storage, right? And the pricing for S3 is
less than your pricing, so where's your additional marginal cost? Is it just
an EC2 instance to handle the requests? Still seems like a really low
threshold...

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axod
Congrats :)

It's a pretty big thing to be able to say that your service will stick around.

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megamark16
Congrats! I'm encouraged to see that others are able to pull it off on their
own without cofounders, it gives me hope for myself.

Thanks Mark

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jws
Congratulations! There should be an award for this, perhaps a tee shirt that
says "Ramen Profitable".

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cperciva
I'm not ramen profitable yet.

~~~
sethg
We need to define a new milestone before "ramen profitable".

Perhaps we can call it "beer profitable", as in, you can't actually live off
your profits but you can buy the occasional beer with them.

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jhancock
great news!!! thanks for such a useful product Colin.

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tptacek
Don't you mean "reaches cash flow positive"?

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cperciva
No. Tarsnap has been cash flow positive for several months, thanks to the fact
that people have to deposit money before using tarsnap. (Tarsnap turns out,
completely by accident, to be an amazing cash flow machine: I take in money
before I provide a service, but Amazon doesn't charge me for the costs of
providing that service until the end of the month, and I don't pay the credit
card bill on which that appears until the end of the following month.)

I mean profitable: Income (which does not include unearned revenue) greater
than expenses.

~~~
tptacek
Then I'm with menloparkbum and not understanding what you mean, since your
business doesn't even cover the cost of keeping its sole staff member from
going into insulin shock.

Didn't really mean to wade in here. Congrats on getting some liftoff with
tarsnap.

~~~
jodrellblank
It feels like you're deliberately not understanding so you can have a massive
row about it.

Tarsnap business has money coming in from paying users, and that is enough to
cover the non-human costs of servicing those users.

It's not a claim of amazing success or resiliency or world-beating
awesomeness, it's a statement of progress, a milestone, a reassurance that
things are moving in the right direction, that tarsnap isn't wallowing in "I
have users but still no income" land.

Stop reading too much into it and then arguing about how much of a misleading
dirty stinking lie it is.

You're spoiling a positive progress report with a meaningless argument and at
the same time implying cperviva is misleading/lying, and stupid/incompetent.
In short, you're trolling.

~~~
tptacek
Hey, Colin: did you take offense?

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cperciva
No, but I did wonder a few times if people were deliberately misunderstanding
what I was saying. :-)

~~~
tptacek
Congrats again.

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jcapote
Cool service, I'll be signing up my two servers over the week

