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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

Some time ago there was a tweet making the rounds with a joke along the lines of:

"Congrats on your startup's Series A. Now you have enough runway to pay for 6 more months of

  - Jira
  - Github
  - Slack
  - Google Office
  - Google Cloud/AWS
  - LaunchDarkly
  - Contentful
  - Tableau
  - Zendesk
  - Salesforce
  - ...

I started to wonder if there is a market for a startup that simply takes all of the best-in-class open source alternatives and hosts the whole package that is commonly needed by companies. Would anyone here use something like that, and why don't smaller hosting providers invest in something like this? You see a lot of them offering basic Webmail/Calendar, but couldn't they go beyond that and use that as a possible revenue stream to compete with the big cloud providers?

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Yes. https://elest.io/

It was on HN 4 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30440486

Thanks for bringing it up, somehow I missed that!

It is very close to what I have in mind, and I am glad to see they are also committing to share revenue with upstream developers.

> Google Cloud/AWS

I mean, this is just operations. Unless startups start investing their entire series A into hardware and colocation contracts, they gotta have somewhere to compute their code.

> You see a lot of them offering basic Webmail/Calendar, but couldn't they go beyond that and use that as a possible revenue stream to compete with the big cloud providers?

That's because webmail and calendar are extremely easy to run with off-the-shelf software and a small team maintaining patches for it. As soon as you get into document collaboration, video calls, data retention/data loss prevention, SAML/LDAP, offering PBs of storage, etc. you end up needing a huge engineering team for each of those respective products, especially if you don't want to become stagnant on features and lose out on the value front.

> Unless startups start investing their entire series A into hardware and colocation contracts,

Most startups can run on a $10/mo vps. Probably many fully grown companies can get away with not much more. The ‘everything cloud’ thing is popular and many investors see it as a sign the cto is an expert when the hosting bills for cloud hosting is high as possible, so I understand why it happens a lot.

I'm nervous about straying from Django ecosystem for its productivity. And people smarter than me using Rails have made peace with their sky high server bills. Has this changed?

That was never a thing. I had django websites running on 2GB of RAM at webfaction (shared hosting) with databases that got techcrunched and went on fine. I had sites with Django/Celery/Postgresql on a single server with 8GB RAM which worked fine for years.

Unless you have an unbelievably I/O or CPU heavy application, the tech stack is not going to be your bottleneck until you are in the tens of thousands of concurrent users.

Yep. One of our most used products is a Django site and it’s been on a 2gb server with MySQL and celery since 2013. No problems at all. Also 0 downtime, literally. Sometimes you get lucky!

> investing their entire series A into hardware and colocation contracts

I have the feeling for 80% of series-A startups, their entire client base could be served from 3 recycled notebooks locked in a janitor's room.

Take a look at https://www.restack.io/. BTW, I created this awesome list :)

I really like it. Are you in Berlin? I am working on something that might be aligned with your USP, I would be interested in chatting with you guys.

Communications from these platforms look so absolutely unprofessional. Having gone through a dialog with a couple familiar names now publicly traded it's strange watching the amateur hour that is this train wreck of dated, half-baked tooling. You can't tell if you're submitting personal, sensitive info to the business entity or if it's some phishing scheme.

you mean ... Startup-as-a-Service ?

Pretty much, yes!

For my own projects, I have:

  - Gitea
  - Drone/Harness CI
  - Taiga (issue tracker, project management)
  - Minio for Storage/Static site hosting (project site/blog/documentation)
  - Synapse (Matrix) for group chat, bots, video conferences.
  - Discourse (for support/community forum)
  - Redash
  - Syncthing for documents/assets, and basic Desktop apps (LibreOffice/Gimp/Inkscape) to edit them.
  - Wagtail for CMS (mostly Django projects), but also used Strapi before and it worked well.

I also was just this week experimenting with Baserow (https://baserow.io) to leverage a no-code platform to build feedback-forms, landing pages with contact forms, etc. Not 100% ready for it, but I'd guess pretty soon it will be.

Anyway, it's mostly me nowadays for these projects, but if lightning strikes and I need to grow a team, it wouldn't be hard for me to add Authelia with an LDAP server to provide SSO.

The big question for me would be (a) if I am too peculiar with this setup to the point that other people would not accept using these tools and (b) if the joke was just an exaggeration or if there is actually a market for funded startups that would be interested in saving some bucks per month by using F/OSS alternatives.

I have heard of sandstorm.io

i haven't got around to trying it yet but yunohost seems to solve part of this problem. it even helps you manage users. not every app is on there though

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