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This is very inspiring! Matt, for your next post(s), in addition to the monetary costs I'd like to hear about how much time you put into maintaining and supporting these projects. I can imagine that with a couple of thousand users you could easily spend a lot of time answering support emails.

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You'd be surprised how easy it is to support web applications, if you work on killing the issues which continue to cause support requests. (BCC had something like 75k trials in 2010. My support load is typically well under an hour a week.)

Maintenance in terms of "Making sure stuff doesn't break" also doesn't have to take a lot of time. January was a bad month for me, and that only took about one hour of firefighting and one hour of (hopefully) preventing the next firefighting.

Wow, that's shockingly low! I'd have guessed at least a few hours a week in answering customer emails.

Thanks. Will do.

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