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Comment by Sembiance | Hacker News Reader

$25,000 a month operating costs. Wow. I'd really love to see a breakdown of these costs! It would help so many other entrepreneurs out there.

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I think they're including salaries in those costs, so i'd guess it's mostly salaries. I'd be surprised if it was more than 2k/month in hosting costs.

I doubt hosting costs are even that high, perhaps even ~1k.

Thankfully, I can help answer this :)

The drilldown is roughly:

* $5K Amazon + mLab hosting

* $3K extra services (intercom, mailchimp, dropbox, gmail, slack etc)

* $1K accounting/payroll overhead

* $1K all office expenses

* $15K salaries

people underestimate the cost of compilations for 10,000 people. We have ~150,000 compilations per month ;)

Have you considered moving the compiler to the client side? In theory you can build a C/C++ and virtually any other language compiler in Javascript.

Security restrictions on the browser might be an issue, but i think you should be able to store the binary output in the local storage and upload it to the server.

yeah but we're not crazy enough to do that :P

The fact that they plan to keep things running indefinitely if possible seem to indicate that servers and bandwidth are not the bulk of the cost

So I guess most of it is on paying developers and maybe some office space. 25,000 won't go a long way, even taking in to account cheaper salaries in Greece.

Edit: Their team page says they have 6 employees, so 25,000 probably doesn't go a long way.

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