Sourcehut Q3 2019 Financial Report | Hacker News Reader

Sourcehut Q3 2019 Financial Report

sourcehut.org

216 pointscolinprince59 comments

As an aside, I've found the Sourcehut source to be really nice. Super concise, very straightforward implementations, easy to read, and cohesive (it seems to be mostly by one person over a relatively short period of time, so that shouldn't be surprising). I like seeing barebones implementations like this, as it sort of shows how much one can accomplish if you don't get bogged down in bullshit like a fancy dynamic UI (that may be important for many markets and users but nonetheless it slows down development tremendously even when outsourced to another dedicated UI person).

I absolutely love SourceHut UI. I don’t have a word for it but it approaches the epitome of functional design.

I’ve always been a critic of Stripe design - although it’s silky smooth and nice, those animations and what not are not as important as densely packed, well organized and information rich UI. People rave about Stripe’s design as if it’s something everyone needs to follow - I couldn’t disagree more. Stripe’s design is overrated and overblown on HN.

Drew has nailed this aspect and I think he wrote about it in his blog.

Today’s design fads are: Gradients (Apple), Magenta colors (Firefox, basically any SaaS) and Brutalist design (Dropbox rebrand), probably a few more that I can’t think of right now.

This shit needs to stop guys. I don’t have anything against a designers but when a designer is designing for the sake of making something without drilling down why it needs to be that way - stop right there and reevaluate. This also applies to non-designers that design things as well. Design is about how things work, not animations and slick effects that wow the users.

I find it clean but very confusing.

e.g., if I'm looking at the Sourcehut source code here: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/

I would expect to be "in" the Sourcehut project, and clicking any of the links at the top would take me to builds, todo, lists, etc. related to that project...but it doesn't, and I don't see any way to go to those things related to the project.

And, to add further confusion, even though I'm logged in, clicking any of those links invites me to login/register again. Frankly, I have no idea WTF is going on in this UI. It looks fine, but it's not at all easy to use for me.

These are two of the major unsolved problems blocking the graduation of alpha to beta. The latter problem falls under single-sign-on, and the former problem falls under the project hub milestone. Rest assured, both are known and going to be taken care of, and part of why it's still considered an alpha. Your patience is appreciated :)

Cool. I thought it was something peculiar about my ad/js/cookie blocking. It wasn't significant enough to make me investigate.

SourceHuts design can be described as utilitarian. It's there to serve a purpose but it incredibly boring and emotionless. For a source code hosting platform this is fine but utilitarian is not what you want every UI to be.

> In summary, Sourcehut is financially healthy, with an operating monthly profit of about $1,038.

> The total gross revenue during this period was $9,172.00

Very cool for a donation-driven project to manage that. Congrats!

Thanks!

Monthly subscriptions are donations now?

Subscriptions on Sourcehut are optional, hence the "donation" descriptor.

A little bit of nuance: For the hosted instance, payment is only optional during the alpha period; unless something changes, sr.ht will eventually require some form of payment. Granted, you can also just download the thing and run it yourself since it's FOSS.

Oh wow, I click on stuff and it just loads another boring html page in a few milliseconds. One request, 4-10KB HTML, and it's absolutely beautiful. It really speaks volumes when a website deliberately sticking to over 20 years old technology is a poster child for great UX.

Also small sidenote: Does it not properly sign the PGP test mails for anyone else?

PGP mail seems to work afaict. Make sure your key is up-to-date, I might have edited it at some point to remove the expiration date.

> Everything works without JavaScript anyway

Can we just take a moment for how beautiful this is? In a world where even documents frequently require arbitrary code execution in order to render, Sourcehut comes along and provides a full-on application with zero JS required.

I guess it's beautiful, in the same sense that ASCII art or 4K intros can be beautiful. But in a world where the change that I'll be using a browser that doesn't support Javascript is vanishingly small, I don't really see the practical benefit.

The world has moved on to depend on unnecessary (sometimes necessary) javascript based frameworks, single page applications that have an enormous complexity. The world works almost like an evolutionary process - the marginal cost of reverting back to previous way of doing things is too high even if objectively the previous way was better than today. Comparing SH (and other javascript-less web apps) to ASCII art or 4k intros is a shallow dismissal.

How do you not see any practical benefit? Sourcehut works well and does everything it needs to.

It's not that your browser doesn't support JS, it's that loading an entire js framework and running mountains of code is so slow. So now we are all bogged down with slow websites for something that could be lightning fast

At the given rates, just go ahead and sign up - I did.

Support privacy. Support open source.

And for those like me outside the git-stream, support BitBucket support.

> BitBucket support

You mean mercurial?

https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-b... - might be relevant.

Yes, I understand that with Bitbucket transitioning from hg+git to only supporting git, Sourcehut is extremely compelling to those of us still using Mercurial. But it's not "Bitbucket" that's being supported here, it's Mercurial. The only sense in which Sourcehut can be said to support Bitbucket in the context of Mercurial is that there's a converter script that's supposed to help port stuff from BB to SH, but that's just an extra script and not part of the core offering.

D'oh! Yes. I feel rather embarrassed now.

Thanks for the correction!

I’ve been following sh for a bit now, but I haven’t figured out what the differentiator is between it, and say, GitHub or GitLab. Obviously the UI design is different, but what are people loving about it on a day to day basis compared to the big two competitors?

Any personal experience or comments from Drew would be appreciated:-)

The one IMO defining feature it has that the gitlhabs don't have is mailing lists. This used to be one of my #1 feature requests on Github years ago.

This might age me, but I would like to know what you like about mailing lists compared to the UI of GitHub. What’s the selling point for mailing lists vs real time threads? I see a cult of people that like mailing lists and google groups, but I don’t quite understand how it’s more pleasant to use than modern UI’s. Any opinion on this?

There are lots and lots of reasons, but one advantage that comes to mind is that you're entirely in control of the data, you can just take your mail spool and leave for greener pastures whenever you want. You don't even need an export process, you already have all of the emails in your archive.

> This might age me, but I would like to know what you like about mailing lists compared to the UI of GitHub.

Me personally, nothing. This might age me but at the time I was requesting this, Github barely had an issue tracker :)

Now it has group discussions which are… better than nothing. And the world moved on to real time chat apps anyway. But I still wish a project by default would get a "forum" which you can send emails to, eg. torvalds.linux@lists.github.io. This is not useful for tiny offshoot projects, but it's super useful for mid-sized open source orgs that would want a discussion/feedback area for users without polluting the issue tracker. With controls for moderation, access, etc. Markdown integration. And so on.

What I mean is, just because it has an email input/output doesn't mean it only has to have that. You can still have nice UIs compatible with well-established protocols.

Off the top of my head, some things that people tell me they like include:

- The CI service, which distinguishes itself by being based on virtual machines instead of Docker, thus supporting foreign kernels like BSD and other cool things Docker can't do

- The lightweight design and lack of JavaScript

- The business model (see latest blog post on sourcehut.org)

- There's no proprietary enterprise version, everything is 100% bona-fide free-as-in-freedom software

- You don't need an account to participate, you can send patchsets and file bugs via email

- Pretty much the only good hosted Mercurial service

Cool. Those are definitely useful and interesting. I don’t think I’ve been enough of a GitX power user to need some of those yet, but I’m sure the day will come. I appreciate the no JavaScript these days! I like rich UI’s but I appreciate the minimalism and trying to do cool stuff with just HTML and css.

How were you inspired to tackle this particular project?

The same reason I start all of my projects: it didn't exist and I thought it ought to, so I made it.

How did you get first users to sign up on SH?

I generally use my blog to announce new projects:

https://drewdevault.com

I'd been talking about SourceHut here and there in passing in various blog posts, and reaching out to people to invite them to a private alpha in the months leading up to the public alpha, then the service was somewhat seeded when the public alpha announcement went up:

https://drewdevault.com/2018/11/15/sr.ht-general-availabilit...

I sort of wish you had a docker CI base image, as all of my testing happens inside of it too; My tests are part of a “docker build .” so that they are consistent.

The lightweight design is nice, but the main repo landing page, the tree view, and the new repo flow could use a tiny bit of visual polish. I may attempt it myself and send a PR.

Is there any word yet on when Sourcehut will move out of "alpha" status? Is it ready yet for actual day to day use?

Have to say this project is looking really promising. I think we need an open alternative to the Github/Gitlab duoply that de-emphasises creeping social media type features.

There's a summary of what the alpha status entails here:

https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/

And a longer explanation is coming in two weeks, for the anniversary of the public alpha's commencement.

Great to hear, thanks. Keep up the good work!

Happily paying for the alpha, and using to host a personal project. Sourcehut already has more features than I'm taking advantage of. It does very well the thing it needs to do most, which is to be a git remote I can access from anywhere.

> I think we need an open alternative to the Github/Gitlab duoply

I think we always need more competition and offerings but let's be very clear, gitlab is an "open alternative" to the github/atlassian duopoly. We're not at a github/gitlab duopoly at all, and gitlab is open regardless. (Yes it has some enterprise features; semantics)

I am so used to working in finance that I assumed that was millions ...

Heh, I wish.

It's a bit confusing. For some of the numbers you don't know whether they are monthly or for the entire quarter. It could be a bit more explicit.

Will keep this in mind for the next one, cheers.

> The total gross revenue during this period was $9,172.00, which after transaction fees comes out to $8,511.83.

That's 7.2% in transaction fees, that seems a lot. I always thought payment processors charged vendors in the 1-2% range. But I have no personal experience in this area.

What I find interesting is the breakdown of monthly vs yearly subscriptions.

223 $2 (paid monthly)

104 $5 (paid monthly)

26 $10 (paid monthly)

582 $2 (paid yearly)

174 $5 (paid yearly)

62 $10 (paid yearly)

I would have never guessed that more people pay yearly than monthly for a 20% discount. Has anyone else seen something similar for their own SAAS?

We charge annual at $5k USD. 1/50 buys that.

I usually buy the year for the discount when I'm getting something (QB, BugSnag, etc) unless it's more than 3k, then I have a think about it.

the ironic part of offering discounts for yearly subscriptions, is that it gives customers an idea of what profit margins you have for the monthly plan. usually not something you want to do.

Less so in SourceHut's case, where all of the prices are basically arbitrary and the financials are public.

that's not necessarily true. Yearly subs give a business some additional benefits which can help to offset the 'lower' margins. There is some correlation, sure, but its not 1:1.

If the prices are low enough that the yearly subscription could be the monthly price of another, then I can absolutely see this happening.

As it is, the highest yearly amount seems to be $100.

Paying things yearly makes 12x less effort in accounting.

($1MM ARR SaaS here)

Monthly subscriptions churn on a monthly basis. Yearly subscriptions accumulate over time and usually remain active the whole year (IOW they churn on a yearly basis).

What's shocking to me is the $2 monthly tier. At that rate you're spending >25% on payment processing fees. Imagine a quarter of your subscribers just donating their money to MasterCard instead.

Yes, I wish he had charged me more. If I’m paying the juice anyway, let’s make the transaction worth it.

Suggestion: a “sourcehut is too cheap” annual subscription option at 2-3x the cost of the normal one.

I'm happy to see a competitor for the big services. I like that it has Mercurial support - we need alternatives to Git. I really wish we had something like this for Fossil (the one available cloud service for Fossil is not exactly usable).

Sadly, not having pull requests, HTML mail and issue tracker is an absolute deal breaker for me, I rely on those for being productive. Otherwise, it's positive to hear that there is some profit made.

Something similar to pull requests is being worked on. I summarized this on Reddit recently:

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/dmkzgv/gitlab_...

There's already a ticket tracker. HTML email isn't going to happen, though.

Well, I need HTML email though for my workflow, so I guess sr.ht isn't going to happen for me, sadly.

This report reminds me of Warren Buffett's famous annual letters to BRK shareholders. Straight to the point, clear figures, no bullshit hype about the future prospects, even the ASCII formatting.

Do you have plans to rewrite Sourcehut in a language that doesn't take 250 ms to generate each page? I'm afraid of what performance will look like when you get some serious traffic, and how your costs will scale. You may end up like reddit.

Other than that, great stuff.

Fantastic.

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