
Sourcehut Q3 2019 Financial Report - colinprince
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2019-10-21-sourcehut-q3-2019-financial-report/
======
SwellJoe
As an aside, I've found the Sourcehut source to be really nice. Super concise,
very straightforward implementations, easy to read, and cohesive (it seems to
be mostly by one person over a relatively short period of time, so that
shouldn't be surprising). I like seeing barebones implementations like this,
as it sort of shows how much one can accomplish if you don't get bogged down
in bullshit like a fancy dynamic UI (that may be important for many markets
and users but nonetheless it slows down development tremendously even when
outsourced to another dedicated UI person).

~~~
spectramax
I absolutely _love_ SourceHut UI. I don’t have a word for it but it approaches
the epitome of functional design.

I’ve always been a critic of Stripe design - although it’s silky smooth and
_nice_ , those animations and what not are not as important as densely packed,
well organized and information rich UI. People rave about Stripe’s design as
if it’s something everyone needs to follow - I couldn’t disagree more.
Stripe’s design is overrated and overblown on HN.

Drew has nailed this aspect and I think he wrote about it in his blog.

Today’s design fads are: Gradients (Apple), Magenta colors (Firefox, basically
any SaaS) and Brutalist design (Dropbox rebrand), probably a few more that I
can’t think of right now.

This shit needs to stop guys. I don’t have anything against a designers but
when a designer is designing for the sake of making something without drilling
down why it needs to be that way - stop right there and reevaluate. This also
applies to non-designers that design things as well. Design is about how
things work, not animations and slick effects that wow the users.

~~~
SwellJoe
I find it clean but very confusing.

e.g., if I'm looking at the Sourcehut source code here:
[https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/](https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/)

I would expect to be "in" the Sourcehut project, and clicking any of the links
at the top would take me to builds, todo, lists, etc. related to that
project...but it doesn't, and I don't see any way to go to those things
related to the project.

And, to add further confusion, even though I'm logged in, clicking any of
those links invites me to login/register again. Frankly, I have no idea WTF is
going on in this UI. It looks fine, but it's not at all easy to use for me.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
These are two of the major unsolved problems blocking the graduation of alpha
to beta. The latter problem falls under single-sign-on, and the former problem
falls under the project hub milestone. Rest assured, both are known and going
to be taken care of, and part of why it's still considered an alpha. Your
patience is appreciated :)

~~~
rlonstein
Cool. I thought it was something peculiar about my ad/js/cookie blocking. It
wasn't significant enough to make me investigate.

------
jammygit
> In summary, Sourcehut is financially healthy, with an operating monthly
> profit of about $1,038.

> The total gross revenue during this period was $9,172.00

Very cool for a donation-driven project to manage that. Congrats!

~~~
Aeolun
Monthly subscriptions are donations now?

~~~
JadoJodo
Subscriptions on Sourcehut are optional, hence the "donation" descriptor.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
A little bit of nuance: For the hosted instance, payment is only optional
during the alpha period; unless something changes, sr.ht will eventually
require some form of payment. Granted, you can also just download the thing
and run it yourself since it's FOSS.

------
Felk
Oh wow, I click on stuff and it just loads another boring html page in a few
milliseconds. One request, 4-10KB HTML, and it's absolutely beautiful. It
really speaks volumes when a website deliberately sticking to over 20 years
old technology is a poster child for great UX.

Also small sidenote: Does it not properly sign the PGP test mails for anyone
else?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
PGP mail seems to work afaict. Make sure your key is up-to-date, I might have
edited it at some point to remove the expiration date.

------
yjftsjthsd-h
> Everything works without JavaScript anyway

Can we just take a moment for how beautiful this is? In a world where even
_documents_ frequently require arbitrary code execution in order to render,
Sourcehut comes along and provides a full-on application with zero JS
required.

~~~
jonas21
I guess it's beautiful, in the same sense that ASCII art or 4K intros can be
beautiful. But in a world where the change that I'll be using a browser that
_doesn 't_ support Javascript is vanishingly small, I don't really see the
practical benefit.

~~~
spectramax
The world has moved on to depend on unnecessary (sometimes necessary)
javascript based frameworks, single page applications that have an enormous
complexity. The world works almost like an evolutionary process - the marginal
cost of reverting back to previous way of doing things is too high even if
objectively the previous way was better than today. Comparing SH (and other
javascript-less web apps) to ASCII art or 4k intros is a shallow dismissal.

How do you not see any practical benefit? Sourcehut works well and does
everything it needs to.

------
eesmith
At the given rates, just go ahead and sign up - I did.

Support privacy. Support open source.

And for those like me outside the git-stream, support BitBucket support.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
> BitBucket support

You mean mercurial?

~~~
saisundar
[https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-
in-b...](https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket)
\- might be relevant.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Yes, I understand that with Bitbucket transitioning from hg+git to only
supporting git, Sourcehut is extremely compelling to those of us still using
Mercurial. But it's not "Bitbucket" that's being supported here, it's
Mercurial. The only sense in which Sourcehut can be said to support Bitbucket
in the context of Mercurial is that there's a converter script that's supposed
to help port stuff from BB to SH, but that's just an extra script and not part
of the core offering.

------
elamje
I’ve been following sh for a bit now, but I haven’t figured out what the
differentiator is between it, and say, GitHub or GitLab. Obviously the UI
design is different, but what are people loving about it on a day to day basis
compared to the big two competitors?

Any personal experience or comments from Drew would be appreciated:-)

~~~
ddevault
Off the top of my head, some things that people tell me they like include:

\- The CI service, which distinguishes itself by being based on virtual
machines instead of Docker, thus supporting foreign kernels like BSD and other
cool things Docker can't do

\- The lightweight design and lack of JavaScript

\- The business model (see latest blog post on sourcehut.org)

\- There's no proprietary enterprise version, everything is 100% bona-fide
free-as-in-freedom software

\- You don't need an account to participate, you can send patchsets and file
bugs via email

\- Pretty much the only good hosted Mercurial service

~~~
elamje
Cool. Those are definitely useful and interesting. I don’t think I’ve been
enough of a GitX power user to need some of those yet, but I’m sure the day
will come. I appreciate the no JavaScript these days! I like rich UI’s but I
appreciate the minimalism and trying to do cool stuff with just HTML and css.

How were you inspired to tackle this particular project?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
The same reason I start all of my projects: it didn't exist and I thought it
ought to, so I made it.

~~~
spectramax
How did you get first users to sign up on SH?

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
I generally use my blog to announce new projects:

[https://drewdevault.com](https://drewdevault.com)

I'd been talking about SourceHut here and there in passing in various blog
posts, and reaching out to people to invite them to a private alpha in the
months leading up to the public alpha, then the service was somewhat seeded
when the public alpha announcement went up:

[https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-
availabilit...](https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-
availability.html)

------
romaniitedomum
Is there any word yet on when Sourcehut will move out of "alpha" status? Is it
ready yet for actual day to day use?

Have to say this project is looking really promising. I think we need an open
alternative to the Github/Gitlab duoply that de-emphasises creeping social
media type features.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
There's a summary of what the alpha status entails here:

[https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/](https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/)

And a longer explanation is coming in two weeks, for the anniversary of the
public alpha's commencement.

~~~
sevensor
Happily paying for the alpha, and using to host a personal project. Sourcehut
already has more features than I'm taking advantage of. It does very well the
thing it needs to do most, which is to be a git remote I can access from
anywhere.

------
vs2
I am so used to working in finance that I assumed that was millions ...

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Heh, I wish.

------
est31
It's a bit confusing. For some of the numbers you don't know whether they are
monthly or for the entire quarter. It could be a bit more explicit.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Will keep this in mind for the next one, cheers.

------
tom_mellior
> The total gross revenue during this period was $9,172.00, which after
> transaction fees comes out to $8,511.83.

That's 7.2% in transaction fees, that seems a lot. I always thought payment
processors charged vendors in the 1-2% range. But I have no personal
experience in this area.

------
philfrasty
What I find interesting is the breakdown of monthly vs yearly subscriptions.

223 $2 (paid monthly)

104 $5 (paid monthly)

26 $10 (paid monthly)

582 $2 (paid yearly)

174 $5 (paid yearly)

62 $10 (paid yearly)

I would have never guessed that more people pay yearly than monthly for a 20%
discount. Has anyone else seen something similar for their own SAAS?

~~~
dajohnson89
the ironic part of offering discounts for yearly subscriptions, is that it
gives customers an idea of what profit margins you have for the monthly plan.
usually not something you want to do.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Less so in SourceHut's case, where all of the prices are basically arbitrary
and the financials are public.

------
bachmeier
I'm happy to see a competitor for the big services. I like that it has
Mercurial support - we need alternatives to Git. I really wish we had
something like this for Fossil (the one available cloud service for Fossil is
not exactly usable).

------
zaarn
Sadly, not having pull requests, HTML mail and issue tracker is an absolute
deal breaker for me, I rely on those for being productive. Otherwise, it's
positive to hear that there is some profit made.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Something similar to pull requests is being worked on. I summarized this on
Reddit recently:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dmkzgv/gitlab_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dmkzgv/gitlab_rolls_back_tos_changes_update_on_free/f56asdl/)

There's already a ticket tracker. HTML email isn't going to happen, though.

~~~
zaarn
Well, I need HTML email though for my workflow, so I guess sr.ht isn't going
to happen for me, sadly.

------
H8crilA
This report reminds me of Warren Buffett's famous annual letters to BRK
shareholders. Straight to the point, clear figures, no bullshit hype about the
future prospects, even the ASCII formatting.

------
ahbyb
Do you have plans to rewrite Sourcehut in a language that doesn't take 250 ms
to generate each page? I'm afraid of what performance will look like when you
get some serious traffic, and how your costs will scale. You may end up like
reddit.

Other than that, great stuff.

------
privateSFacct
Fantastic.

