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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

> the site makes roughly the same amount of money (around $200K) every year

Where does the money come from? Between 2013 and 2014 the site apparently gained just 1K customers, and only new customers pay (around $10) so that would mean $10k of revenue from new users.

I understand there's an option to pay more to "archive" stuff, but does that bring an additional $190k of revenue??

(Disclaimer: I'm a happy user of Pinboard. I don't "love" it but I use it regularly).

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The site has 24k active users. Do you think it's impossible that 7.6k of them have the archive option of $25/year enabled? I have no reason to doubt this, archive feature is great and supports the service.

A third is a lot, yes, but not impossible, no.

I would say that people who sign up for Pinboard (+ pay ~$10) are much more likely to support a service that they like and rely on. Otherwise they would've chosen a free service like Diigo or Delicious to begin with.

English is not my first language, so I'm not sure. Does "makes $200K every year" mean net profit or just the income from which hosting still has to be subtracted from? If it's the latter, that means a lot more people are paying for archive.

The $200k is the income (revenue). Monthly expenses have been published in the past, most recently (AFAIK) for 2012: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au7yiR802qQmdDJ...

He even has health insurance!

I remember Maciej saying he collocates his servers, which works out to be remarkably cheap in the long run. I'd assume the server costs are actually pretty small, relative to the income of the site.

Those costs are public. See https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Au7yiR802qQmdDJ...

The link is for 2012, but they haven't changed much.

Pinboard offers a $25 per year archival account

https://pinboard.in/upgrade/

Those are active user numbers, not total signups. The system has churn as some proportion of users sign up and stop using it. Which he mentions when he says how stable the usage is.

It's slightly confusing as he isn't publishing total signup numbers.

And also, archiving revenue as others mentioned here.

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