Hello hackers,<p>I'm working on my first app, which uses a cloud service as the back-end. I never seriously thought about cost until recently I talked to a friend, who is about to release his photo app. He told me that it is very easy to spend $200k per month on an app.<p>I think this is a shocking number, consider many apps can't be profitable at beginning (instagram/twitter). I can't afford to release an app if it will cost me that much.<p>I have no experience of managing an app, nor can I predict the cost. Before I decided to post this, I did check some online articles comparing cloud pricing. But those pricing numbers are very obscure without concrete examples. I want to see some data points like this:<p>type of app: phone app (or website)<p>choice of cloud service: Amazon EC2 (or app engine/ heroku/ Azure/ parse)<p>userbase: 500k<p>data types: both text and binary file (image, video ...)<p>monthly cost: $200k<p>I know it really depends on the app, and a well-written code can significantly reduce cost. But I just want to have some rough idea. To be frank, my budget for maintaining my app is $1000/month at most. I don't know what kind of userbase I can support with that kind of money. Or must I be founded by VC?
It won't cost you that much, because you're almost certainly not going to be successful as Instagram or Twitter. If you are, you have what is called a "high class problem."<p>Here's a less stratospheric comparable for you: I run a business with something like 250k users and 10~20k monthly active users, with those numbers representing people with accounts. The costs to run the business are do not scale linearly with traffic, at all. I spend about $300 a month on hosting (VPS at Rackspace) and bandwidth and another few hundred bucks on various recurring things (server monitoring, analytics solutions, etc).<p>The overwhelmingly likely source of failure for your application is not that it will bankrupt you with hosting cost. It is that you will not be able to convince two dozen people to actually use it. This should be the worry that wakes you up screaming in the middle of the night and causes you to go get advice from people you think are credible. It is far and away your largest source of risk. Pick any population of startups which you admire: their #1 scaling problem is that they have no scaling problems at all!
I'd be surprised if Instagram was paying that much. I've known at least one person sharing video at 1 million uniques per day and his cost was a fraction of 200k (though I don't remember how much exactly).<p>The chances of you going outside your 1k budget before you can take on investment or earn some revenue are basically zero.
200k a month seems absurd.<p>Even reddit spends only like 20k a month (From what I remember reading about them) and they have far more users then 500k.<p>Like patio11 said, I'd first worry about getting to 2k users before worrying about hosting charges.