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Comment by jml78 | Hacker News Reader

Congrats, it looks great, love that you have Linux app support.

Question, have you done the business analysis to know how long you can afford to run the system when giving away 500MB? Even your paid model seems really inexpensive. Do you have enough margin to immediately not go broke?

I am not trying to throw shade, I am just curious because it almost seems too good to be true since you aren’t running any ads and your price is free and/or cheap

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This type of analysis is kind of pointless because the chances of the key assumptions being correct are almost none. How many free vs paid users will sign up? How much resources will they actually consume? The answers aren’t known until you test the market and probably change over time too.

That said, if he’s just bootstrapping this as a hobby with low overhead these prices are just fine. He probably actually makes a good profit once his user counts climb a bit. This type of service can be easy to keep afloat in these prices is my gut feeling and that’s probably good enough.

Besides there are some easy solutions to an emergency situation. Raise prices. Stop offering free plans. Change the resource limits. Etc. so much he can do before going broke.

Yes. Over the past 3 years I've been researching and re-iterating different monetization strategies. While I don't want to divulge exact operating costs, I can tell you that it's sustainable to provide free storage and the amount on the paid Everest plan.

What kind of backup and disaster recovery plans do you have in place, if any? Are they tested?

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