37signals $3M cloud bill breakdown | Hacker News Reader

37signals $3M cloud bill breakdown

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OpenSearch is notoriously expensive. I'll go further: any managed service at AWS is notoriously expensive.

NAT Gateway? Expensive.

Elasticache? Expensive.

Sagemaker suite? Expensive.

The list goes on. You're paying for a butt to be in a seat. I'd also like to see a breakdown of where they are spending money in S3. I've worked at places where the bill was $4m per month, so sometimes it amuses me when people complain about their (much) lower bills.

You’re paying either way, managed or your own engineering time. Pick which line item you want the spend on.

Could you roll your own ES clusters, Redis clusters, or object storage systems? Certainly. Is that the best use of your engineering capacity vs revenue generating work? That’s the math you’ve got to work out, and the role of your engineering management. If you’re a steady state business, then it probably makes sense to start performing aggressive cost optimization. If you’re a rocket ship, spend a bit more and optimize to grow the top line as fast as you can; you can optimize costs later.

With all that said, I’d agree AWS egress bandwidth is extortionate.

True, but we had found ways around that premium and still get the same service levels (basically by having dedicated teams to shared resources). Yeah my job was cost optimization type work - we had a few folks on my team dedicated to this.

For a company that makes "tens of millions in annual profits " in 2020, this doesn't seems much at all.

They had around 60 employees, which put the salary and expenses on employees close to 12M a year.

Assuming the "tens" were minimum at 20M, their revenue would be around ~$35M.

Yeah, I read a lot of these "cloud is expensive" posts and I wonder: did you ever run a real on-prem data center with 24/7 staffing for both the hardware and the software? When you compute the fully loaded costs (and the opportunity value of being able to scale) cloud is really not obscenely expensive, although (as many others report) premier services definitely are priced to make a fat profit for amazon.

I spend in cloud to ensure we're not the bottleneck in the org- we pay our scientists, engineers, and labs far more money than we spend on cloud.

$3 million per year for a business of that size doesn't sound too obscene. DHH is forgetting that electricity, cooling, fault-tolerance are also expensive, the price of "insanely powerful iron you can buy from Dell" is not the whole story.

Also, previously (October 2022) from DHH: https://world.hey.com/dhh/why-we-re-leaving-the-cloud-654b47...

I think that was specific to HEY, not the other properties.

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