
What does Unsplash cost to run? - prawn
https://crew.co/backstage/dispatch/what-does-unsplash-cost/
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xeniak
Previously:

    
    
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11522661
      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11519085

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revelation

      While Heroku charges a small premium over other hosting services
    

The "small premium" is not small at all.

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cgag
The amount they're spending on heroku is relatively low compared to the cost
of the 150TB of bandwidth their using from imgix.

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revelation
I guess that's the next point then, if you're spending that much on traffic
you should probably look at just buying dedicated bandwidth.

I'm sure it doesn't have the same awesome CDN latency and I'm also sure it
doesn't matter one bit for multi megabyte images.

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diziet
When I've spoken to folks running infrastructure, for a lot of companies
straightforward advice such as this always worked to cut costs: Move from
Heroku/whatever other managed provider for your actual
database/worker/webserver as costs will rise as you scale Start using AWS
Reserved Instances and Spot Instances (or similar) for your workloads

Advice such as this has often saved > 30k/month hosting. The caveat is these
were mostly SaaS companies dealing with data.

Interestingly enough in Unspash's case, their actual cost on Heroku/etc is
fairly minimal as they don't seem to be doing much with the data. If they
start building things that collect a lot more user data, run ads, do lots of
stuff with it transforming user data, run analytics, etc., their heroku
infrastructure will be a bottleneck. Right now, it's not.

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vatotemking
How do they generate profit?

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prawn
They have 3-5 feeder sites as free services that bring them traffic for
crew.co. That's where they presumably make enough money to finance Unsplash,
their office/café/etc.

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tuananh
well i still think it's a lot of money to run a site like this!

~~~
tgarma1234
As a referral source for new business in your marketing budget it would be a
very good investment even if it only generated $150000 a month in new
business. And I have no doubt they are getting a heck of a lot more from it
than that.

