While I love Matrix and support their mission, this pricing is quite a bit steep, as well as the 5-person limit being too restricting. They will price out large majority of people who actually could/would want to switch.
In case it's not clear, it isn't a 5 person limit for Element Home servers, it's just that up to 5 (active) users are included in your subscription. You can add more users at any time for an additional $2/month. Also bear in mind that you're not charged for everyone registered on your homserver, just the ones that are using it :)
(I head up Element Matrix Services / EMS)
(I head up Element Matrix Services)
If you're not using Lightsail, you're overpaying. Look at this comparison: https://www.vpsbenchmarks.com/compare/ec2_vs_vultr
AWS bandwidth through anything but Lightsail is 1000 times more expensive. AWS servers are 3-5x more expensive. AWS isn't successful because it's good, it's successful because it has good marketing.
Look at OVH and Linode.
Is Element hiring, by the way? Here's a look at my skills, if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26305569
As for AWS, yep, they're certainly not cheap, but they do have good points in quite a few areas and give you a great number of tools to build with. Hopefully the trick is not to get too dependent upon their infrastructure, and we'll definitely be looking to other cloud platforms to help bring the costs down in future.
> Is Element hiring, by the way? Here's a look at my skills, if you're interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26305569
Yes, we are hiring (and are rapidly growing at the moment)! Thanks for the link - I'll pass it on to one of the team (not just saying that, I really will). That said, in the mean time you're probably best to have a look at the open positions (https://apply.workable.com/elementio/) and see if there's something there that particularly takes your fancy. If there is, apply, and say that Rick from EMS sent you via way of HN ;)
AWS wins because it has a fun user interface and good marketing.
> they're certainly not cheap
The cheapest component (compute) of an on-demand EC2 instance is five times more expensive than Linode, Vultr, and OVH. Bandwidth is, I'm not exaggerating at all, 1000 times more expensive. If you use reserved instance discounts and Spot Instances, it's still two times more expensive than hourly-billed Linode and Vultr.
If you're willing to bear with its worse GUI and monthly billing, OVH is a good choice. They've been in business for longer than AWS and operate more servers. Their prices are so low that they're in shortage. If you need instances that aren't in shortage, try Azure.
"AWS Cost Optimization Guru" is a mistake. The best way to optimize your AWS costs is to migrate off of AWS.
> give you a great number of tools to build with
Yes, although you could host your compute at one of the third-parties I mentioned, and still call into AWS services. It adds a little bit of latency for great cost savings. Linode and Vultr gives you DNS, Kubernetes, block storage, load balancers, and private network in addition to compute.
> Yes, we are hiring
Let me know where I could be most useful at Element, or if there's a need for a general fixer role.
> You can only have 5 people with addresses at your server
Actually, it's better than this. You can technically have as many people / accounts as you like registered on your server, but you're limited to 5 active users by default. Users are considered "active" if they've been logged in to and using your server for more than two days in a given 30 day period.
$5 per month is a big entry cost. And I am not sure how well this price will work in the long run when people begin using the server a lot. Perhaps pricing based on message throughput or used storage capacity would make for an easier and fairer entry.