The transparency in this article is something we can learn from. It's sad to see a service like Everpix go as they were making money. But if you look at the other numbers, they just staffed up too quickly. Salaries, personnel and payrolling costs of together $3.7 million in two years is just way to much compared to the money they were making.
What I'm curious about is that the cost per user (storing photos) is what killed them, or a burn-rate simply to high for what they're doing.
But then again it's easy to look at this as an outsider and try to point out their flaws. I'm hoping to learn more about how they monitored specific business metrics to test their business model.
If they were paying $35K/mo to AWS for hosting and storage, they could have paid about that much for a year of hosting on their own machines. There's a lot we don't know about this angle, but suffice it to say they were throwing money away on infrastructure.
Yes. We moved back to our own infrastructure as well. But AWS has a broad range of services. I can imagine storing photos on S3 makes sense for a startup like Everpix. Because, you don't need to worry scaling on storage level. Sometimes it makes sense to pay a premium, but it should really be tied to your growth metrics. If you see a month to month growth to which you can't keep up with updating and migrating your own infrastructure, then make the move to AWS or another big cloud vendor.
What I'm curious about is that the cost per user (storing photos) is what killed them, or a burn-rate simply to high for what they're doing.
But then again it's easy to look at this as an outsider and try to point out their flaws. I'm hoping to learn more about how they monitored specific business metrics to test their business model.