Hacker News Reader

That math holds if they are planning to only spend money on hiring those people for 1 year only.

More realistically, the money is probably for tech overhead. Server space, software licensing, money for keeping all their servers working for a while (support, replacement servers/drives) etc.

View on HN

Not being adversarial: What kind of software licensing is Snapchat paying? Dev tools, ok. Some BI/reporting stuff? I'd imagine everything else would be open source, right?

They run fully on Google App Engine and obviously they have to store all of that heavy video data somewhere so bandwidth costs will be crazy.

So a combination of them not having their own infra like FB does, and just the nature of the data they are responsible for is very heavy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com