www.wordfence.com: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/f5fcf22f-8daf-5567-b3...
cybersecurity.miami.edu: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/5ad00348-8c5d-566c-8a...
apple.com: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/a8f2f34f-b695-5ce9-b6...
facebook.com: https://www.fastorslow.com/app/profile/afffcc61-4eb9-5e6c-88...
Thanks!! I run Wordfence which does quite well. Profitable and the team is around 35 really great folks with a focus on solid engineering. So we fund it ourselves. For a going concern like us the costs are very modest and we can afford to run it indefinitely without charging.
In fact just the bit of brand awareness we get for our main product, Wordfence probably more than justifies the costs.
We actually created this as an internal tool because there wasn't anything that would give you a clear indication of site performance from DNS lookup to connect to TTFB to page render from around the world. Our own market is global and even a 1% drop in conversion really costs. After building it we realized that it's very little incremental effort to make it available for all.
As I mentioned we're about to migrate into AWS where we run much of our other infrastructure. The financial model and eng design we came up with keeps our costs surprisingly low. We can handle huge traffic spikes and it roughly doubled the cost, even with the spikes. So I'm confident we can run this for the long haul as a free product.
A few things I can commit to: Firstly, it's extremely unlikely that you'll see ads on FastOrSlow other than our own company name. That's never been our model and I can't stand when a great site or service gets smothered in ads.
In addition, our company has been around since 2006 and we've been made acquisition offers many many times by large companies that you know well. We've consistently turned them down and will continue to do so because we are profitable, love our independence and I think we all know what happens to many great products after acquisition. I'm telling you this because I want you to know that this won't be changing hands to a company that will try to monetize it in obnoxious ways.
No plans to offer a paid service right now. Our next release is for internal use and will allow us to do performance surveys across large numbers of sites and present statistically significant insights as research to the online community.
Happy to answer any other questions. Thanks for your interest!