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Comment by devoply | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much he paid for it. Last I heard he was making something like 250k per year. I would expect delicious to go for a few million at least. Did he buy it for a song, or did he get investors or funding?

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I followed the saga, or rather the bits of it Maciej mentioned here and there, and I bet the price was not high. Basically the owner was bleeding money with shocking AWS charges, and was looking for a way out himself. I expect one of the reasons that it's going read-only so quickly is to turn off the saving/replicating machinery and cut bills. Once he does that, he can probably turn on export features again.

I wonder what is so wrong in delicious' backend that is so expensive to run. Maybe that's why Yahoo ditched it, for some reason it's a money pit...? Note how Maciej is explicitly saying he will never turn it back on, not even redirecting the api endpoints which should be trivial. There must be a reason for that.

I'll do a technical post about all this soon. The current Delicious hosting bill is around $2500/month, which is twice what Pinboard costs to run. Part of the problem is that the site is spread across a bunch of small servers, as a legacy of its days on AWS.

I expect "Export" to go away immediately and be replaced with "Migrate to Pinboard for $11/yr."

The blog post states the opposite, that export will be restored (the previous owner had turned it off). It also implies that the export will continue to be available for some time (the stuff about no time pressure).

I'd bet mid 5-figures at most. Why would a product that hasn't been relevant for a decade sell for millions?

Just because you say it's not relevant doesn't mean it doesn't still have plenty of users.

Couldn't find it on the site, but do you know how much a delicious subscription costs?

No clue, but I assume he wants to push all users (paid & free) to pinboard

Given the $35,000 price tag, the plan is to convert almost 0 users.

(something like 2000 out of millions of accounts would pay that off in a year or 2)

Sounds like a great deal

I'm curious about what people think Delicious is worth. I promise to tell all later.

$100,000 USD, but with a covenant in place to keep it running in read-only mode forever. $300,000 USD without the covenant.

(Assumes new owner takes over the $30,000/year hosting bill the moment the transaction completes. See Maciej's comment somewhere in the great-grandparent's thread with that number - $2500/month hosting).

Well, I'm way off. Purchase price was $35,000 USD - https://thenextweb.com/apps/2017/06/01/its-the-end-of-an-era...

> I just spoke to Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski. In a statement, he said “I am the greatest.” Ceglowski also confirmed the purchase price for del.icio.us, which was $35,000.

This is gold and yes sir you are pretty damn great! Good job.

I'd say about a late model Honda Accord in good condition worth.

About $200k per year.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14438221

250,000? That's is almost 22,000+ paid accounts. If that is correct, it is a pretty big achievement.

Maciej publishes a yearly progress statement [0] with revenues and costs included.

[0]https://blog.pinboard.in/2016/07/pinboard_turns_seven/

The website claims to have 25k users [1].

[1]: https://pinboard.in/tour/

I'm happy to be one of them. I honestly barely use it, but I had a ton of bookmarks at Delicious that I was uncomfortable about losing. $11/yr means they stick around, plus I do still stuff links in there every now and then.

The true number of accounts is probably higher since anyone who bought in before he switched to annual billing paid a one time charge.

I'd be interested in that too. But I don't think it's a big money. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't $1 since otherwise you have still-active users calling your support and consuming your time and money.

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