The relevant bits of forum discussion:
--- Quote LWT ---
I don't think that you will make a lot money out of such a language learning website.
IMHO you will never earn so
much money that all the hours of work will ever get paid.
From my LWT Project, I can only say that I worked on it about five full months fulltime
(around 1200 hours) in total.
If one wants to earn about 30 Euros per hour, which is a rather low "IT salary", that
would be 36,000 Euros. You
need 300 customers paying 120 Euros per annum to have the initial investment payed. And
that's only the
beginning. There are server costs, you need a service desk, etc.
--- My response ---
Thanks for your honest opinion. You may well be right, it's the first time I've started a
venture like this, and it's a bit of an experiment with no serious downside if it happens
to fail.
My goals are relatively modest, I don't need it to make a lot of money, your example of
36000 Euros per year actually sounds pretty good, especially since this could continue
even if I wasn't improving the site. (In reality though, I have enough ideas that I'll
definitely continue to improve it if it gets to that stage!) I'm thinking of charging
something more like 1 or 2 euros per month, or more for more advanced features, since I
think this is what I'd probably be willing to pay for such a service. So to reach your
example numbers I'd need 3000 paying customers! But there are a huge number people in the
world who could benefit from this, especially if it runs well on smart phones and
tablets, and has easier access to content than it does currently. Am I deluded? :)
Server costs should be pretty low, since a lot of the work is being done client side in
the browser, and the back end is pretty lightweight, a JSON API running on Node.js and
MongoDB.