Sourcehut Q1 2019 financial report | Hacker News Reader

Sourcehut Q1 2019 financial report

lists.sr.ht

134 pointsrobertbalent17 comments

Thanks for posting this, Robert! For those interested, I also posted the monthly "what's cooking" today, which should give you an idea of the pace of feature development and cool stuff since you last checked out sr.ht:

https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-announce/%3C201905151603...

I'm always available to answer questions, either here or at sir@cmpwn.com.

I have a question! What's with all the preformatted widescreen text? Why not just use plain text and let it wrap?

The text is formatted as it comes in. Most plaintext emails are hard-wrapped at 72 columns and SourceHut doesn't molest them. However, there has been some research into format=flowed, where the sender can opt-in to having their emails reflowed on Sourcehut, but that hasn't been implemented on our side yet.

I love the transparency that this report brings. An honest report of what happened, and what to expect going forward. Wish this was more common, especially for companies that run a lot of the infrastructure for open source and free software developers to use.

It seems to be a excellent start to a platform. But what worries me is the way how the funding of the entire platform need to be sustainable, otherwise all of the services within will eventually close and be lost. Instead of where each service could have it's own funding, and people can vote with their wallet which service to keep.

Hey diggan! The cost of each service is marginal compared to the collective cost of running everything. Services which don't receive much interest are run at a reduced cost by way of simply not being worked on, and the smaller volume of traffic they receive reduces costs further - so it's a self correcting system. If anyone wants to revive them, the code is open source and you can send along patches to improve anything you're interested in. So far I think this has worked pretty well! I also keep a line of communication open with the users to make sure that I have feedback on what people like and where their pain points are so I can prioritize my own work.

FWIW: sr.ht is pretty cool, has a nice no-nonsense UI, and the build system is really simple and powerful. It's not "done" but it works and is going in the right direction. It's a very nice corner of the Internet. I've been using it for personal repos and I'm really happy.

I support sourcehut, because I would like to see it evolve, and hopefully keep the no-nonsense UI approach. Having a nontrivial site with a usable interface running without JS in 2019 is beautiful on its own.

When I first saw this project, I thought it was interesting and signed up. But I've never gotten around to using it. I don't remember what I thought the name was when I read about it, but for some reason it got stuck in my head that the sr.ht domain stood for "Sir Hat". And that's how I've always read it in my head whenever I see it anywhere.

Sourcehut makes more sense.

The name for the specefic website is sr.ht (Sir hat) [0] but the name of the software is Sourcehut.

  [0] https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-availability.html

I actively use it and still call it Sir Hat in my head.

I call it "Sir Hat" too, and I can tell you what made me read it like that: the author/owner is 'Sir_Cmpwn on HN.

He called it sir hat somewhere in the show hn thread so I've been calling it that too.

I'm actively using[0] sr.ht with a paid membership. I really like the service and the build system is super simple and easy to use, while fulfilling everything I need for my private development. The owner has been super responsive to feedback/issues. I encourage other people to try it out as well and I am looking forward to see how this service grows.

[0] https://git.sr.ht/~rukenshia/

This is a great service but honestly the pricing is too low at $20/year.

You should change your professional plan, probably Mark it up 3-4x at least. If professionals are using the service (ie they’re making money themselves from it) some will pay $40/month for it. Just a few of those subscribers will let you hit all your goals, work full time on it and let you keep the $2/month plan out there in the long term.

Once the alpha ends and the beta begins, I'll have a chance to reconsider these price points, and with data like this to back it up. It's expected that payment will become mandatory at that time as well.

Chaos Communication Congress had (has?) a model where regular tickets were priced very reasonably, and there were special "business tickets" that were marked up by a factor of 5 compared to regular ticket prices. The only difference is that you only get an invoice for a business ticket, so attendees who have their costs covered by a company need the business ticket, while individual attendees benefit from lower prices.

I don't know how invoicing works for a web service, but maybe that would be a model to consider? Keep the low price point for individual users, but use a lever like this to add some considerable markup for companies purchasing your services.

A while back the (large) company I worked for was evaluating two web service companies, one was ~4 times more expensive than the other. They both had all the functions we needed and from a practical point of view neither was better than the other. However the cheap one could only be paid for by monthly billing to a credit card and the expensive one was happy to send us quarterly invoices. We went with the expensive one.

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