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Comment by xyzzy_plugh | Hacker News Reader

I'll be totally honest: I have no idea what they possibly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on. That seems totally absurd and reckless.

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Seems cheap to me. Host anything and you're gonna need developers. Developers are expensive. A hundred thousand dollars is pretty much what you'd pay for a single developer in a year. 5 Devs is still a small team and that's half a million dollars per year.

There are countries other than the US.

And?

And other countries have salaries lower than $100k/year for software devs.

Yeah. If they’d said “hundreds, or maybe thousands of dollars”, ok, sure. But that just cannot possibly be an inherently expensive service to host.

There is also weather and voice recognition services. If implemented with third party APIs those costs can add up.

They charged a subscription for those. If they lost money on that they have nobody to blame but themselves.

This thread is very confusing to me - they charged a subscription for these features. They weren't losing money - they were spending it. Money in, money out.

Their original statement was "we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting the data" that was scraped from the Pebble app store. So, explicitly not on the other services. I have to agree with other commenters that $200,000+ seems like an extravagant bill for hosting this data for 8 years with a web frontend and maybe 20,000 users.

I think this is a bit of a disingenuous reading of the article when the surrounding text states:

> Since then, we built a replacement app store API that was compatible with the old app store front end. We built a storage backend for it, and then we spent enormous effort to import the data that we salvaged. We’ve built a totally new dev portal, where y’all submitted brand new apps that never existed while Pebble was around. [...] And the App Store that we’ve built together is much more than it was when Pebble stopped existing. We’ve patched hundreds of apps with Timeline and weather endpoint updates. We’ve curated removal requests from people who wanted to unpublish their apps. And it has new versions of old apps, and brand new apps from the two hackathons we’ve run!

All of these things take time and money.

None of that is included in their statement that "we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on storing and hosting the data". If they meant that they spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on building a dev portal, patching apps, and the other stuff you mention, they should have said that instead of "storing and hosting the data".

You are choosing a very literal interpretation, which is fine, if you think it is useful. To me, it looks disingenuous and irrelevant. The hosting and storage of that data would have been pointless without this additional development. And arguably, the app store development _is_ part of hosting it.

I think we're talking about 500 updated apps here. You could've done it manually, didnt need a kubernetes cluster

Cool, it is imperative those services are not operated at a loss. If you choose to do charity, you best make peace with the fact that you will never get either the time nor the money back.

I don't think they were operating as a charity - they were charging for the features that cost them money to provide... that's how they spent the aforementioned money.

They funded some software development, they paid hosting bills, and they paid third party services for weather data, etc.

So they cashflowed the services they provided. And they’re not hunderds of thousands of dollars out of pocket on this, right? So what are they complaining about? Are they worried about losing their revenue stream or what?

This thread started with OP calling Pebble rentseeking and used the subscription services as an example. I replied to point out that the subscription fees were used to fund services and development - they weren't profit. Then the thread went off the rails with some claiming that spending money is proof that Rebble is incompetent and others claiming that they shouldn't be whining about spending money (which they weren't) and I'm no longer clear what point you are trying to make.

Stated elsewhere in thread, I believe the primary concern is that Rebble will import the data into a separate, closed app store owned by Pebble, which Pebble will lock Rebble out of (i.e. block scraping and refuse to release this data), and then if Pebble goes bust again, Rebble is left with less than they started with.

> Stated elsewhere in thread, I believe the primary concern is that Rebble will import the data into a separate, closed app store owned by Pebble, which Pebble will lock Rebble out of

This is what Rebble is doing right now.

The proposal as per the article by Pebble is for Rebble to keep hosting, and for Pebble to pay them to do that. Why would Pebble move things into a closed store when their openness last time is what allowed Rebble to scrape all the apps in the first place? Only Rebble has behaved like this.

Developer time?

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