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Comment by donavanm | Hacker News Reader

That cost is definitely not bandwidth. Content delivery is around $0.005-0.01 per GB with an external provider. Less if yiu have the scale to do it in house. My guess is that the bulk of that spend is compute + storage/io.

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The cost is definitely bandwidth, Snapchat doesn't have much of a storage problem as snaps have an actual TTL.

Assuming half of it is bandwidth costs, that means that a daily active user is using ~380 MB/day (assuming $0.01/GB). That seems pretty hefty as an average. Especially if you consider the encoding snapchat uses puts each 10s video at about 1MB in size. 380MB is a little over an hour of snapchat quality video, that seems excessive as an average. If I were a major stockholder I'd be pushing to see why these hosting costs were so high.

I think that’s $0.60 per quarter not per day. 380MB for the quarter per daily active user doesn’t seem that unreasonable.

$0.60 for 380MB seems unreasonable, though. I think the GP was calculating based on the quarterly period.

Oh, you are right. I was thinking $0.006 not $0.60 when I did that math in my head.

CDN? Cross-region replication? DB replication/failsafe/backups? No idea, just spitballing.

I bet bandwidth is a large cost, but I bet compute is a big component too. Snapchat uses Google App Engine, an awesome platform but expensive (comparable to Heroku).

Regardless, my understanding is that Snap now gets some sort of flat rate deal from Google, so not sure how important the individual components are.

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