What Does My Site Cost?

The site is ~~wrong~~ somewhat correct about how big reddits homepage is.<p>~~It seems to not run any scripts when testing, so 1.5MB is the basic JS + CSS.~~<p>In reality, it&#x27;s much, much worse. (On a desktop)<p>Even with an adblocker, reddit.com downloaded 18MB in the first 10 seconds. That would put that cost at over $1.<p>I stopped after that because it seemed to be just continuously downloading... something.<p>I know Reddit is quite media driven these days, but it seems to be unnecessary prefetching a lot<p>Edit: Looks like I was testing the desktop version, see jefftk&#x27;s reply.<p>However, it doesn&#x27;t help reddit&#x27;s case that much. After looking into what it&#x27;s actually downloading in my &quot;desktop&quot; test, there are lots of huge PNG images (1000x1000 +) that seem to be displayed as tiny thumbnails.<p>And for an infinitely scrolling page, it prefetches all the images in the feed at full resolution.<p>If I turn off my adblocker, I get an autoplaying amazon ad (~5MB).<p>Additionally, it starts auto-playing a livestreams which is just below the fold.

For Germany it says 0.07 USD prepaid for 1.39 MB which is 50 USD for 1 GB. Telekom offers 2 GB for 9.95 EUR prepaid which yields 0.0082 USD and is an order of magnitude lower than the quoted number. And this is literally the first offering I looked at, the second provider I looked at offers 12 GB for 15.99 EUR which brings the number down to 0.0022 EUR.<p>I would take those numbers with a large grain of salt at the very least.

In case you are wondering why that&#x27;s the case: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cansumer.ca&#x2F;canada-phone-plan-pricing&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cansumer.ca&#x2F;canada-phone-plan-pricing&#x2F;</a><p>&gt; The Big 3 Canadian telecom companies (Bell, Rogers and Telus) own 90% of the market and charge higher prices due to a lack of competition.

&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com</a> weighs 1.39MB.<p>Google Fi (in the US, at least) is $10&#x2F;GB. So 1000mb is $10, or $.01 per mb. It&#x27;d be only $.0139 on Fi.<p>That&#x27;s quite a huge difference. The chart even says that US data would be $.09 which is still hugely different.<p>It claims to use the cheapest plan from the dominant carrier in the country. That doesn&#x27;t mean that everyone is getting screwed like this, just most people.<p>They say they get the prices from ITU, but I don&#x27;t know where on ITU they found that data, but I feel like maybe something is being used wrong.

I feel this is more an indictment of Canadian data prices than Reddit’s bloat.<p>Why on Earth is it so expensive?

At this point in history, I thought certain webites would be paying consumers to visit their site. Yes--literally paying us to view in credits, paypal, or bitcoin.<p>It wold be nice to see Facebook offering a few pennies for the marketing data we pay to give them. It would be nice to be paid for high ranking comments too. Say for instance, a guy writes a researched answer to a question on Reddit, and it blew up. Reddit would pay pay that individual a few dimes. The quality of comments would probally increase? Maybe less bathroom humor, and real thoughtful answers?<p>Could anyone imagine if we got a bill at the end of the month detailing what we pay per website&#x2F;download incident?<p>You went to facebook 40 times, at a bandwidth, or percentage you pay us, at a cost of $6.00<p>You went to Reddit 30 times, at a cost of $3.00<p>(It will never happen because the big players are becoming very good Lobbiest&#x27;s. If it ever did happen, I can guarantee, there would be no bloat. If it ever did happpen, it might redispute some if the obsence profits these guys hide? I still think most people would cheerily contribute to sites they respect without any form of enticement.)

The methodology is a bit odd. As best as I can tell it looks at the cheapest data plan that offers &gt;500MB. If there&#x27;s a plan that&#x27;s $1 more per month but offers 100GB of data, the price per visit would drop rapidly but this tradeoff wouldn&#x27;t be reflected in their price.<p>They say it&#x27;s &quot;best case&quot; but that appears to be based on the minimum hurdle to get a data plan, rather than the minimum data price.<p>I think a better measurement would be a range based on a few different price levels (cheapest&#x2F;most expensive&#x2F;modal) but I understand that would be much harder to implement.

I don&#x27;t know about other countries, but in the UK doing this:<p>&gt; using the least expensive plan with a (minimum) data allowance of 500 MB over (a minimum of) 30 days<p>Is just rubbish.<p>It&#x27;s just impossible to price things like this, take EE&#x27;s pricing per GB for a 1 month sim:<p>* 1GB - £14 - £14 per GB<p>* 120GB - £20 - £0.16p per GB<p>* 10GB - £20 - £2 per GB<p>* 200GB - £23 - $0.115p per GB<p>* Unlimited - £35<p>The total price of the cheapest contract is £6 cheaper than the next step up, which is <i>100</i> times cheaper per GB.

Interesting way to put this data, but it’s outright wrong in most cases in day to day life. The plans most people purchase has much better Data&#x2F;$ ratio.<p>And this conclusion is the opposite:<p>&gt; Because these numbers are based on the least expensive plan, they are best case scenarios.<p>They are the <i>worst case scenarios</i> at the very least in Brazil where I have purchased such packages

Hugged to death (for me). It took a few cracks to get this screenshot.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;9QlY5xt" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;9QlY5xt</a>

Use this to automatically redirect to the old.reddit version<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;old-reddit-redirect&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;addons.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;firefox&#x2F;addon&#x2F;old-reddit-re...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;old-reddit-redirect&#x2F;dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;old-reddit-redirec...</a>

Their data is so wrong.<p>Fizz for example is for Quebec subscriber only (but offer coverage over the whole country). It&#x27;s still quite expansive per GB if you get the smallest amount of data, but still you would get for 16$ CAD per month for a 1 GB mobile plan. That means 0.0178$, which is an order of magnitude cheaper than what they said.<p>I don&#x27;t know how they got their price, that&#x27;s really not clear from their page. Canada is a HUGE country, there&#x27;s not a single provider that has an unique price for the whole country. Some province get far cheaper price for many different reasons (competitive market, population density, type of users, etc...). Even the big providers doesn&#x27;t keep the same price in every province.

I imagine this assumes you pay for a certain amount of data each month? The standard plan I have here in France has unlimited 4G and 5G data and costs me 15 euros a month (I also use them for the home&#x2F;office internet for 40 euros a month so it is 15 instead of 20 euros for the cell). The cost of visiting a site on moibile under such a plan is essentially zero.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210707105923&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whatdoesmysitecost.com&#x2F;test&#x2F;210707_AiDc36_6f01cdff93b8299725303f88e60febbc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20210707105923&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;whatdoesm...</a> (posted another user, I can&#x27;t load the site)<p>Out of the countries listed, I only have recent experience with the U.S. It says $0.09 for 1.39MB using &quot;the least expensive plan with a minimum data allowance of 500MB over a minimum of 30 days&quot;. That works out to $30.6-$34.2 for a 500MB plan. I&#x27;d say the pricing data is several years out of date.

I realize this is more of an indictment on how crazy expensive data is in Canada but I would like to mention that the &quot;redesigned&quot; Reddit is so bloated, even my i5 Mac mini from last year struggles. And other than the bloat, they also added extra unnecessary white space to make you scroll more (and thus shove move ads in). Also the continuous popups in mobile browser to &quot;Open in official app&quot; is very use hostile. They basically ruined their site on purpose to make users go to their app instead as most apps can&#x27;t have ad blockers unless you use PiHole or something. If I really need to, I use unofficial Apollo to view Reddit. But other than that, I have pretty much stopped visiting the site.

old.reddit.com is the only way to browse that site. I really don&#x27;t think I will be able to stay the day they pull the plug on the old version.

I&#x27;m very surprised at how much data costs in Canada.<p>In India, it costs me 7.43 USD for 84 days of 1.5GiB high-speed 4g data per day (plus unlimited calling). After that it drops of to a lower speed, but you can top off cheaply.<p>That&#x27;s $0.058 per GiB or $0.00005 per MiB

Submitted title was &quot;Reddit.com weighs 1.39MB. Here’s what that costs around the globe&quot;. Since this has nothing in particular to do with the ever-sensational Reddit, that counts as linkbait. (Also, &quot;Blah blah. Here&#x27;s what that blah&quot; is a linkbait headline trope in its own right.)<p>We&#x27;ve reverted the title as the site guidelines ask:<p>&quot;<i>Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don&#x27;t editorialize.</i>&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

So... from a really quick search I&#x27;m guessing there&#x27;s more to the story in practice. Knowing nothing about Canadian carriers, I went to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whistleout.ca&#x2F;CellPhones&#x2F;Guides&#x2F;best-cell-phone-plans" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.whistleout.ca&#x2F;CellPhones&#x2F;Guides&#x2F;best-cell-phone-...</a> and saw a 1G&#x2F;$23 plan. That gives $0.022 &#x2F; MB = $0.03 for Reddit, so much less than $0.17. Is it the choice of the largest carrier that breaks the comparison in Canada&#x27;s case? Or am I missing something else?

I&#x27;ve gone the opposite direction (here in Canada). I&#x27;m on a plan that costs at most $13 (+HST) per month but can get cheaper. It gives me unlimited international text&#x2F;multimedia messaging, 100 dialed minutes &#x2F; unlimited incoming minutes per month and 250MB of data.<p>Pathetic? Sure. But just don&#x27;t use mobile data unless you need it. 250MB is enough for data plan based messaging, Strava, Google Maps (with cached maps) and whatever information you need to look up. You don&#x27;t really need to watch 1080p streaming video outside the house.<p>If anything this actually encourages healthy phone habits.<p>If you do need massive data, suck it up, pay the CAD $80&#x2F;month for the big data package, then the incremental cost of visiting a given web site is zero.<p>Cheaper? Look it up. It&#x27;s Public Mobile prepaid. $15&#x2F;month minus $2 for autopay (which everyone uses), minus $1&#x2F;month for every year you&#x27;ve been on to a maximum of 5, minus $1&#x2F;month for every referred friend (or spouse!) that is currently using it. I think the wife and I together are running at $21 or $22 per month currently.<p>Yes, would be nice to have dirt cheap internet and mobile data, but we don&#x27;t. So make the best of what we do have.

Deck for Reddit [1] is even worse [2].<p>Thanks, super useful, now I know I gotta work on some assets optimization.<p>- [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rdddeck.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;rdddeck.com</a><p>- [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webpagetest.org&#x2F;result&#x2F;210707_AiDc8S_8ed51fd2240acaa2b5a4be48139c03ad&#x2F;1&#x2F;details&#x2F;#waterfall_view_step1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.webpagetest.org&#x2F;result&#x2F;210707_AiDc8S_8ed51fd2240...</a>

This always seemed like a back door way to finally have the web finally embrace a micropayments business model.<p>By this point ads, and the tracking scripts associated with ad networks, have grown so large that they may cost more in bandwidth than they generate in sales. People are famously hesitant to pay for content, but in this case it’s “free” if it means dumping the ads.

They could easily reduce that... For example, they use 48x48 images for images that are displayed at 12x12 pixels...<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;nMXLd4H.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;nMXLd4H.png</a>

Bear in mind that the smallest data plan is a pathologically bad case. For instance in New Zealand 40GB is $80&#x2F;mo - so almost exactly 1USD&#x2F;GB. So 1.39MB is $0.00139 but is listed at $0.05.

I am in the US and I feel like most people have unlimited data. I am atypical and have Google Fi so I pay 10 dollars per gb. So 1.39mb would be $0.0139 for me. Are Canadians really paying 10x my rate?

You can replace reddit.com with teddit.net and have a much lighter UI.

Apparently, my website&#x27;s heaviest page costs 0 to 1 cent. Smaller pages are a fifth of the size.<p>It bothers me that many similar websites (i.e. text content) load 2-5 MB of data for just text on a page. Pretty much everything past the first few kilobytes are useless to the reader.<p>These websites fall apart when you&#x27;re not on a recent Macbook with a wired gigabit connection. Developers forget that people browse the web in the subway, on intercity trains and on crappy hotel&#x2F;airport internet.

As soon as Reddit turns off old.reddit.com I will never return. Their now years old redesign is just horrible. It&#x27;s bloated, information poor, and has totally ruined the site.

Past related threads:<p><i>The cost of using different sites on mobile networks around the world</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14192503" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=14192503</a> - April 2017 (90 comments)<p><i>What Does My Site Cost?</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9187128" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=9187128</a> - March 2015 (1 comment)

The $0.01 number for India is off by at least two orders of magnitude.<p>I use a telephone plan that gives 1GB&#x2F;day for 3 months for 8USD. That comes to around $0.0001 cents per MB.

While it doesn&#x27;t change the results by an order of magnitude, reddit.com is very different depending on who&#x27;s loading it. Just playing with exit points of a VPN provider, I can get mobile website that&#x27;s anywhere from 500kb to 3mb to load depending on which articles are at the top in a given region. Some regions seem to love articles with big graphics, and some seem to value text articles. Or, it could just be luck of the draw.

i.reddit.com for the win!<p>Really, though, I’m part of the problem. The product I’m working on is a heavy JavaScript-based content editor. It’s definitely a much better UX than the lighter weight previous version. But we made the user-facing content pages Preact-based simply to keep our stack consistent. We’re a small team, and that’s been a real time saver.<p>Hopefully, we’ll get around to optimizing things in the future, but it’s not something anyone other than the dev team cares about.

So happy I have my grandfathered unlimited Verizon. I know I&#x27;ll lose that when I move to 5G, based on what I&#x27;m seeing. Enjoying it for now though. I am excited to see the number of free municipal wi-fi growing [1], though none are near me yet.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Municipal_wireless_network#United_States" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Municipal_wireless_network#Uni...</a>

The article won&#x27;t load for me, so I&#x27;m not sure if this is about reddit.com in a browser, or the Reddit mobile app. Sounds like the browser, based on other comments. They intentionally make the browser experience as terrible as possible to force people into the app (not that the app is much better). Reddit is hostile to their users and doesn&#x27;t care about usability.

My iPad(it’s a 9.7 one, but anyway) suffocates when I visit Reddit. The same device that runs heavy 3D games. Something is definitely wrong.

Highly recommend this pertinent and brilliant talk from several years ago:<p>video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=iYpl0QVCr6U</a><p>text: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;idlewords.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;website_obesity.htm" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;idlewords.com&#x2F;talks&#x2F;website_obesity.htm</a>

<i>because this is the least expensive plan it is the best case scenario</i><p>That is a wildly incorrect claim. The only people I know on limited data plans are elderly. Everyone else is either on a cheap, slow unlimited plan or an expensive, fast unlimited plan. Even if I count my deprioritization quota of 22GB as my &quot;limit&quot; visiting Reddit only costs me 0.16 cents.

Considering the second most popular website in the world sends a gigabyte per hour (youtube) is this stuff a concern anymore?

Brutal. I&#x27;m on Mint which costs something like $240 a year for 2x 10GB plans. But they don&#x27;t cut you off or charge you more if you go over. They just throttle you a bit more during congestion events. It costs me less than a cent to visit reddit, under the pessimistic assumption that they throttle me to zero after I use my 10GB.

Poland is near the bottom of all these graphs (meaning cheapest) and that tracks with my anecdotal experience. When I visited Europe a few years ago, I bought a SIM card in Poland and for just a couple Euro I got 4GB of data. At the time that was significantly cheaper than my own mobile plan at home.

I wonder if the price of mobile data per megabyte depends on the population density and larger metropolitan areas vs. rural. I.e. the higher the density the cheaper. At least intuitively should be the case, because otherwise why would the prices vary so widely?

And you pay all that and then the page is covered with a giant modal dialog trying to force you to use the mobile app instead of your web browser.

Given all the other things Reddit does, it seems to me this could just be another part of the “ruin the web to push the app” strategy.

The cost numbers does not make any sense for me, you get 8gb for 10 usd in Brazil postpaid, around 3 times lower than the prices used.

How is the least expensive plan the best case scenario. The prices go down <i>significantly</i> per MB on larger plans.

I wonder how much would it cost to visit CNN

I pay $30&#x2F;month for unlimited everything (including HotSpot) on Visible (Verizon MVNO) in NYC.

Does anyone else just use old.reddit.com since the (now no longer new) site redesign is so awful?

This is BS, it states 3 cents for France, but most people have unlimited plans for 20 euros here.

Curious to see how much of this homepage is thumbnails, how much html, how much js...

Canadians are unhappy but maybe in ten years they will be happy with a population whose minds remained healthy because bandwidth costs luckily created a controlling feedback mechanism to otherwise addictive social media.

There is a small mistake in the results.<p>Its Hong Kong not Honk Kong

WTF. You buy a fixed amount of data in Canada?

we&#x27;re all working from home, no one&#x27;s using mobile data &#x2F;s

should be increased to $100

fighting global warming starts from here, we should punish the bloat culture advocators

Maybe it&#x27;d be good if more people had to pay for data? Website owners might actually try to optimize their sites rather than constantly making them worse.

More disturbing than mobile prices in Canada is electricity prices in Africa IMO. I heard a while ago that people are actually trading sex for access to generator power.<p>This means on that continent at least unneeded JS in web pages is literally AIDS.