If your startup survive next 6 months it is already more cost-effective to buy a server.
And if startup fails you still have a server to run your next startup.
Isn't it how you save money by picking cheaper product instead of more expensive?
We save by buying hardware and renting DC space.
If we were using AWS we would not save.
Did you see how much we saved comparing to AWS? We could even hire an admin for each of 850 servers and would still have money left.
But we have only one person taking care of hardware replacements. That is enough for the whole setup.
I am bootstrapping a SaaS for 13 years. We are at $100M+ ARR and almost a hundred people.
Still enjoying it. We've slowly built a strong team during these years and it is a real pleasure to participate and see them solve problems, innovate and iterate. There is nothing VC funding can offer that would make my life better or my work more enjoyable.
I am thankful to myself for ignoring VC funds and acquisition offers.
Not all content is equal. Good content require efforts, often efforts of a team.
Youtube is a good example of how revenue share will work in practice. Some creators are getting millions there, some maybe hundreds. But as a consumer you can find good content for almost any topic you can think of.
There is a lot of intersection between Ahrefs tools and search. We were collecting web data for Ahrefs tools for 12 years, now we repurpose these data for Yep.
This is how we see it. Your content is helpful to people, your content helps search engine to provide relevant results, relevant results help search engine to keep user base and get revenue from ads. Search engines could be supporting people creating helpful content. But they are not.
Google does it in Youtube. So if you create good video you can make living from it, but if you write a good blog you can't live from it. Unless you put affiliate links, ads or maybe paywall.
We start from the hard problem - search itself. When we are happy with a search results we will add ads and revenue share. There is no revenue to share at the moment.
It is hard to believe how high cloud costs are.