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Comment by ocean_moist | Hacker News Reader

The only way out for something like this to stay afloat is to be subsidized by a big tech company.

$7,500 monthly is nothing to a large tech company. It sort of does makes sense for big companies to subsidize this so that the quality and amount of software engineers that join their company increases.

This value prop is intangible, but I feel like at least one big company would go for it.

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The $7500 jumped out at me, but for a different reason. This seems awfully high for a site with 2 million registered users. I feel like some backend optimization could get than number way down ($1000/mo?).

What is all this computing power going towards?

I imagine they need to run code for their exercises on a server. There are probably lots of ways to optimize that, and perhaps even ways to get the code running in the browser via webassembly or something, but all of these things require technical expertise and time.

That's interesting. Well, they are coding gurus, so maybe it's feasible :)

It is going straight to Jeff Bezos pocket selling them servers at at 10 to 20 times markup then reasonable

> 10 to 20 times markup

I don't want to argue that AWS is cheap, but I call hyperbole here. Where can I find an m5.large (2 core 3.1GHz CPU, 8GiB RAM, 10Gbps network, $70/month) for $7 USD a month?

The plain servers aren't that bad, but then they get some extra billing in. Traffic is pretty nuts, if you sustain sending on that 10 Gb/s link it will cost you approx $160000 per month.

Then there are all the services that ain't plain servers, those are generally priced at at least a 10x markup, some of them much more than that.

agreed. this can be optimized by the community. Sometimes, and I'm not saying this happened I am just saying that sometimes engineers have a strong desire to over-engineer and that might be costing money. Also want to add that maybe you can get approved for AWS for startups for example and migrate some compute there.

They are already on AWS, and that is the problem. Probably wouldn't cost 1/10 with normal server leasing, but they have to code their way out of any AWS specific services they rely on before they can switch provider.

Well... they could charge for it.

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