[HN Gopher] Soup.io Will Be Discontinued
___________________________________________________________________
Soup.io Will Be Discontinued
Author : codingminds
Score : 44 points
Date : 2020-07-11 18:34 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (kitchen.soup.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (kitchen.soup.io)
| k33n wrote:
| If you have millions of users and can't figure out how to
| monetize them, you deserve to fail. This is the most pathetic
| post I've ever read.
| k33n wrote:
| This is hilarious. I've now made a handful of posts about how
| pathetic this is. They had millions of users and just gave up.
| It's downright trivial to monetize that large of a user base.
| They're mad. And they're going to keep flagging me. But I will be
| here all day folks!
| dang wrote:
| Please stop. The way you've vandalized this thread is easily a
| bannable offense. I'm going to put this down to going on tilt
| (it happens) and not ban you at the moment, but please stop
| now. And please don't post any more flamebait--your account has
| unfortunately done that quite a bit.
|
| If you wouldn't mind reviewing
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking
| to the rules from now on, we'd be grateful.
| jlokier wrote:
| They report 10kEUR monthly costs and 1.5kEUR revenue.
|
| I may be full of it, but I'm fairly confident I could reduce
| their server costs to below their revenue in a matter of days or
| weeks. 6 million users is a lot, but it's not vast even if they
| have real-time connections and a lot of storage.
|
| I imagine that a lot of HN more experienced users could do the
| same.
|
| Assuming I'm not full of it, that suggests soup.io could be
| marginally profitable as long as nobody is paid to run it.
|
| At 1.5kEUR MRR, it would still have to be a labour of love for
| someone.
|
| I couldn't afford to put in the time for free, but surely there
| are others who can.
| nicc wrote:
| > I'm fairly confident I could reduce their server costs to
| below their revenue in a matter of days or weeks.
|
| > I couldn't afford to put in the time for free, but surely
| there are others who can.
|
| OK.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I believe they sold exclusive servers as a benefit of their
| paid subscription. That'll quickly get expensive.
|
| Also, s3 quickly sums up if you host content and its difficult
| to replace.
| jlokier wrote:
| > I believe they sold exclusive servers as a benefit of their
| paid subscription. That'll quickly get expensive.
|
| Ouch. If they are selling servers that cost more to run than
| they are getting from the sale, that's foolish and difficult
| to back out of.
|
| If the servers don't cost more to run than they are getting
| from the sale, cost shouldn't be a problem as it's net
| income. Doesn't matter if it's expensive.
|
| > Also, s3 quickly sums up if you host content and its
| difficult to replace.
|
| It's a lot of work to replace S3 if it's deeply embedded in
| all the code, and especially if people have been linking
| directly to S3 buckets.
|
| Depends how much data they are storing of course, but S3
| migration can be done when there's a compelling need. It's
| not the cheapest storage around.
| rzzzt wrote:
| MinIO has an S3 compatible API:
| https://docs.min.io/docs/aws-cli-with-minio.html
| sosodev wrote:
| Do you think they might have explored options to reduce costs
| before deciding to discontinue the service?
| scrollaway wrote:
| I'm usually pretty quick to dismiss such claims as well but
| in this instance I agree with GP jlokier. I do these kinds of
| massive emergency cost reductions fairly often with my
| clients and there's always a story of the current maintainers
| either missing some critical knowledge about what they're
| currently using / could use instead; or simply massive
| tunnelvision.
|
| Some key factors here:
|
| - Discontinuing _expensive_ parts of the product is better
| than discontinuing the entire product.
|
| - I see the M word being thrown around and that... uh...
| potentially says something.
|
| - "We're not open sourcing because the product is too
| complicated" is also extremely telling.
|
| - VERY often, "I'll discontinue because I can't afford to run
| it anymore" hides an underlying "I don't want to run it
| anymore"; one the maintainer sometimes doesn't fully realize
| themselves. I've seen this a lot on GDPR day, people shutting
| off services because it's "too expensive to comply". Talked
| to a _bunch_ of them, and after a lot of chatting it always
| boils down to "This will give me a much needed break from
| the stress of running this thing which doesn't pay my rent,
| and I get to dodge the blame".
|
| I'm going to go ahead and extend the offer GP can't make.
| soup.io maintainers, if you're reading this, are indeed
| spending 10k+ EUR on infra, and do want to keep your service
| alive and running, please reach out, I'll work pro bono. I
| also have some good contacts in the archiving world if it
| comes to that.
| im3w1l wrote:
| Any pain point will push marginal companies out, but it
| will also turn other non-marginal companies into marginal
| ones.
| monoideism wrote:
| What "M" word?
| scrollaway wrote:
| Microservices ;)
| jlokier wrote:
| Well it was a guess. That's why I qualified myself with "I
| may be full of it". There isn't enough information about
| their system to make a serious assessment.
|
| Maybe they did. Maybe they decided it's possible but would
| take too long and they can't afford the loss meanwhile. Maybe
| they explored options but don't have the right knowledge.
|
| But 10kEUR monthly cost for _serving_ 6 million users seems
| avoidably high unless it 's something compute and data
| intensive like gaming.
|
| It seems like a perfectly normal cost, even a sensible
| choice, for a cloud-based, invested-in startup with cash to
| burn that is optimising for speed to market and growth. But
| not for one that is cost optimised.
|
| All that said, I wonder if their cost is actually mostly on
| _people_ to run and develop the thing. Other comments have
| taken it as meaning the cost of infrastructure, and I ran
| with that. But soup.io 's own note does not say it's all on
| servers.
|
| If that's the case, obviously it's a different situation and
| there may be no reasonable way to reduce the costs below
| revenue.
| ealexhudson wrote:
| Is it possible to design a piece of software that is
| identical to soup.io but runs at a fraction of the cost?
|
| The answer is almost certainly "yes, if you're willing to
| rewrite it from scratch". Unfortunately the capex required
| to do that weighs heavily on the opex saving.
|
| "They should have designed it from the start to be
| efficient" would normally be my next thought - but there by
| grace go us all.
| x0x0 wrote:
| I'd focus on the 1.5kEUR revenue. That is the problem -- even
| if you reduce server costs 10x, you still need someone who
| wants to run a charity to take over.
| surround wrote:
| Does archive.org plan on backing it up?
| sigio wrote:
| Reading posts like these always makes me wonder... how high are
| the costs of running these setups... and wasn't there a way to
| get funding from the users (and limit costs, so a low income
| would suffice)
| themgt wrote:
| They say here[0]: _We are currently paying near the 10,000EUR
| mark per month and our revenue streams are at 1,500EUR.
|
| The infrastructure and micro-services of soup became more and
| more complex over the years and the amount of data is huge,
| really huge. To serve nearly 6 million users is a resource-
| intensive duty.
|
| This is also the reason why we dropped the idea of open-
| sourcing soup. It's too complex to maintain and to hand-over._
|
| Hard to know where the $ are exactly going, but $11k/month will
| buy you a lot of server. Sounds like maybe just wasn't worth it
| given the revenue but I've got to believe it could be
| rearchitected so at least the hosting portion was profitable.
|
| [0] https://kitchen.soup.io/post/696542642/Thanks-for-your-
| feedb...
| momokoko wrote:
| Let this be a lesson to people that rationalize AWS high cost
| as something that won't matter. If you have a low margin
| product like this, infrastructure costs can sink you. This
| isn't too say they were using AWS, just that infrastructure
| cost is sometimes more important than development velocity.
| rhizome wrote:
| > _10,000EUR mark per month_
|
| holy chowder!
| mad182 wrote:
| AWS is cheap to start with, but once you got some scale,
| the numbers starts racking up quickly. It's a really bad
| idea to use AWS for a project with lots of users and low
| earnings per user. Of course, for some kind of eCommerce
| project with millions in turnover the server costs doesn't
| matter, but for a small company or individual project
| hosting choice can be the difference between making a
| decent living or burning money.
| rhizome wrote:
| Absolutely, and "can I see the billing" is one of the
| first questions I ask in my head whenever some new
| platform technology is announced.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I have to wonder. Could this be profitable if the costs of AWS
| were not so casually hand waved away like many are prone to do?
|
| People treat the cost of infrastructure as irrelevant as it
| should just be a fraction of the costs, at least starting out.
| But there would be numerous smaller opportunities which could be
| profitable if costs were managed properly.
| jarym wrote:
| Well if AWS was the sole culprit then they could have spent
| time to migrate to a Hetzner or OVH.
|
| I think I read their revenues were 1500/mo - not nearly enough
| to pay for running costs and a single founder salary.
| TylerE wrote:
| That's the real issue. Even if all costs are zero, EUR18k/yr
| really isn't that much.
| pndy wrote:
| If I remember correctly, at some point after a year-lasting
| downtime due to hardware failure (whole 2016 was _the-year-
| that-didnt-happen_ ), users were told that site relies on local
| (to the Austrian creators) ISP infrastructure and it will
| continue to use it out of costs - no word was given when
| soup.io moved elsewhere since that time but they did and it
| wasn't AWS.
| thestepafter wrote:
| Why do software companies shut down like this instead of finding
| someone that may be interested in taking it over? All I ever see
| are notifications of services shutting down, many of them "labors
| of love" that have been around for X years. Why not find someone
| that will take it over and keep your dream alive?
| jsnell wrote:
| Handing over a site with user data requires a lot of trust in
| the new owner. If they were not vetted and turn out anot good
| stewards of the data (e.g. end up hacked with all the databases
| leaked, even if not actively malicious), some of the moral
| culpability lies with original owners.
|
| User data is toxic. It's your responsibility to make sure it
| gets disposed of properly when winding down a failed venture.
| rhizome wrote:
| > _If they were not vetted and turn out anot good stewards of
| the data (e.g. end up hacked with all the databases leaked,
| even if not actively malicious), some of the moral
| culpability lies with original owners._
|
| I appreciate your point, but I'm struck by the impression
| that this never results in consequences.
| jsnell wrote:
| That's why I wrote the "moral" part there. I agree that
| it's basically guaranteed there will be no legal
| consequences, but you'll still know it was your fault.
| rhizome wrote:
| Capital is amoral, though. Which, I appreciate your
| point, but it's literally not a term in any capitalist
| transaction. Ethics? There's a reason why people make
| jokes about "Business Ethics" being the shortest class in
| any Business major curriculum. You can advocate for
| inserting religion, PBCs, or any number of "hey come on
| guyz" strategies, but none of it carries any
| significance. I'd certainly like to hear of post-
| Industrial Revolution capitalists taking shame or guilt
| into account.
| adamcharnock wrote:
| Having also been in a similar spot, it was a combination of
| things: 1) I just wanted to be done with it, I was totally sick
| of the project and wanted to move on with my life, and 2) the
| money offered wasn't that great, and 3) it would have had to be
| decent money to persuade me to be involved in the handover
| (which would have been required).
| DangerousPie wrote:
| Presumably they tried and failed.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Or overvalued the business and/or assets. "Welp, no one wants
| to pay asking price, nuke it" when it could've lived on as a
| one person shop at a lower sales price.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| If the value of the site were enough that they could make
| any money after transaction and transition costs, they
| would likely have taken that step. Given the time horizon
| on which they are shutting down, I would guess that they
| have been out of money, and that the service makes less
| than it costs to run even with a skeleton crew. Another
| comment in this post cites information that confirms this.
| rhizome wrote:
| > _If the value of the site were enough that they could
| make any money after transaction and transition costs,
| they would likely have taken that step._
|
| ...if it occurs to them. They have to do the calculations
| in order to make that decision, after all.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| You don't have to guess whether it occurred to them,
| since you can read the information in the other comment.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23805099
| kolinko wrote:
| Having been in a similar spot - user data and reputation. If
| you spent a bunch of years building a site, you really want to
| trust someone to not exploit the site by spamming users and so
| on.
|
| Even if the site is sold, your reputation will still suffer if
| the new owner has a data leak or starts selling user data.
|
| Also, a bunch of people will say that they want to take over
| the site, but finding someone that you think is competent
| enough to maintain it is really difficult. In my case, I tried
| two different people and both of them made some really bad
| decisions regarding the design during the trial period.
| k33n wrote:
| Europeans just don't have the grit to forge ahead like Americans
| do. Kind of pathetic when you consider they have millions of
| users.
| jermier wrote:
| This is why we need to scrape services like this and keep copies
| for posterity. For every site like this that can't sustain itself
| well into the future, a part of the Internet and its culture
| dies. RIP Soup.io
| nojito wrote:
| Who's going to pay for that?
| chewzerita wrote:
| OP may have a different answer, but the Internet Archive[0]
| and the /r/DataHoarder[1] communities are really obsessed
| with digital archival and preservation. The latter has gone
| to great lengths to, well, _hoard_ anything and everything
| imaginable that they can.
|
| [0] https://archive.org/
|
| [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
| surround wrote:
| Doesn't the Internet Archive have a collection of websites
| they backed up just before they went down? Do they plan on
| backing up Soup.io? Do they even know about it?
| rzzzt wrote:
| I think you are thinking of the Archive Team:
| https://www.archiveteam.org/
| [deleted]
| zucker42 wrote:
| The Internet archive...or just individuals sharing the cost.
| PhantomGremlin wrote:
| _Who's going to pay for that?_
|
| The "Imperial We", obviously. Goes along with "someone should
| do something ...".
|
| It's true it would be nice to keep copies for posterity, but
| it's not realistically possible to archive everything created
| for all time.
|
| OTOH, state actors like the NSA should be archiving lots of
| things like this, because "you never know ...". But,
| unfortunately for us, a meme from years ago nailed this: _"
| My computer hard drive crashed. NSA won't send me their
| backup copy."_
| [deleted]
| jarym wrote:
| I hope no one sees this as insensitive but would they consider
| open sourcing the platform? Might find a 2nd home amongst people
| that would self-host?
| servercobra wrote:
| On the latest post on their site:
|
| > The infrastructure and micro-services of soup became more and
| more complex over the years and the amount of data is huge,
| really huge. To serve nearly 6 million users is a resource-
| intensive duty.
|
| > This is also the reason why we dropped the idea of open-
| sourcing soup. It's too complex to maintain and to hand-over.
| jarym wrote:
| Missed that thanks. Sounds like their tech was too
| complicated to maintain cost effectively.
|
| However, that isn't a valid justification to not open-source
| the code.
|
| I also read this comment on their blog 'We do this for free,
| invest our time and money and try to keep this site up and
| running. So please don't insult us. Instead you should donate
| to support us.'
|
| Sounds like they weren't really running it like a business
| and didn't have much idea on how to monetise it. Shame.
| pantalaimon wrote:
| Their tech was also notoriously unreliable to the point
| where I stopped using the site because eventually it was
| more likely to find it not-working than working.
|
| This might have changed in recent years, but most users
| were already gone when I last checked.
|
| It's a pity because when it worked, it was a really great
| site and many people I knew were on it.
| k33n wrote:
| Since my last comment about Europeans not having the same grit
| that Americans do got flagged.. let me try again.
|
| I think this is a case study in grit, or rather the lack thereof.
| There's no reason to get emotional about it.
|
| There's a reason that 99/100 popular web platforms launch out of
| the US. We know how to make money. We have the grit to do it.
| Europeans have demonstrated that they don't have what it takes.
| If you have millions of users and can't figure out how to
| monetize them, you deserve to fail.
| the-dude wrote:
| This is not much better.
| k33n wrote:
| The truth hurts. Learn from it!
| MattGaiser wrote:
| I never thought it was so much about not having grit but
| more that grit doesn't pay off in Europe due to the high
| taxes and messy employment rules.
| jlokier wrote:
| The taxes and employment are fine in practice, and in
| some ways setting up a company in Europe (or at least
| some parts of Europe) is easier and cheaper than the US.
|
| For something like soup.io, it's loss-making, and has
| little revenue, so tax and employment are both
| irrelevant.
|
| What's harder is the investment culture. There isn't as
| much of a culture of investing in experimental startups
| that probably won't make a profit. But many parts of the
| US have the same issue - investment isn't readily
| available everywhere there either.
| k33n wrote:
| The taxes and employment issues are probably the number
| one reason almost nothing notable has ever launched out
| of Europe. This will be flagged. But I don't mind :)
| the-dude wrote:
| You are a self absorbed, misinformed, nationalistic prick.
|
| Do whatever you want to do with it.
| k33n wrote:
| Next time you bash America or Americans, remember that
| Europeans can't cut it in the free market. Love the
| immediate rush to censorship too. Just like a Euro :D
| dang wrote:
| Please don't break the site guidelines yourself,
| regardless of how bad the other comments are. It only
| makes the thread even worse. Just flag it and move on, as
| the guidelines ask:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You can
| also email us at hn@ycombinator.com to be sure that we
| know about it.
| urxvtcd wrote:
| I wrote a very simple soup content downloader some time ago, you
| can get it here: https://github.com/urxvtcd/soup-io-downloader
|
| It has some shortcomings, mainly content is saved under random
| file name without extension. Hm, maybe I'll try to fix that now.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I'd not heard of this site before but I'm surprised they've got 6
| million users, 11k monthly server costs, and aren't profitable.
|
| I clicked around for a few minutes and saw a lot of user activity
| and no ads. If I owned the site, rather than trying to close, I'd
| just make every tenth post in a feed be an ad.
|
| That plus some actions to curtail server costs, depending on
| whatever their high cost items are... Seems like you could
| probably monetize that userbase somehow.
| grumple wrote:
| They are absolutely throwing away an easily monetizeable
| product here.
| JustARandomGuy wrote:
| I see quite a few people in this thread blaming the high cost of
| AWS. I don't understand, why is this a problem with AWS - isn't
| it a problem with freeloading? Yes, moving hosting may save you
| some bucks, but fundamentally isn't the problem the large number
| of freeloaders?
|
| If even 5% of the 6 million users paid $20 a year, Soup would
| have $6 million a year - more than enough to run a small company
| on.
|
| FInally, i'll point to my favorite post on the subject, Don't be
| a free user by idlewords:
| https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I agree. The AWS complaints don't address the fundamental issue
| with this "business" and other startups like it, lackluster
| revenue. I think sometimes in the tech industry all the freely
| flowing angel and VC money makes us a bit unrealistic about how
| things work out in the real world. Low marginal cost of
| distribution does not mean no marginal cost of distribution.
| There are no bandwidth fairies riding rainbow farting unicorns
| sprinkling hosting and bandwidth dust on startups. At some
| point, you have to get serious about what you're doing.
| na85 wrote:
| >Yes, moving hosting may save you some bucks, but fundamentally
| isn't the problem the large number of freeloaders?
|
| I find this viewpoint problematic. Are the users freeloaders,
| or is the product just not compelling enough to attract paying
| users?
|
| Self reflection is sometimes painful but there's a reason "lack
| of market fit" is a common startup story. Insulting the users
| by calling them freeloaders, _when you are overtly offering
| them a free service_ , seems self-defeating.
| Deimorz wrote:
| Also worth noting that according to Crunchbase, Soup received
| at least EUR80,000 in venture capital in 2007 and 2008:
| https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/soup-io#section-fund...
|
| Yes, that's not a massive amount of money and it was a long
| time ago, but it should still mean that they're not totally in
| control of the company, and that there are investors that have
| been expecting a return out of it eventually. Just reaching a
| break-even/moderately-profitable state probably wouldn't have
| been good enough.
|
| I also see this article on TechCrunch talking about "soup.me"
| receiving $530,000 in VC in 2012:
| https://techcrunch.com/2012/02/14/soup-me-lands-530000-lets-...
|
| It specifically says that it's a "reboot service" of soup.io,
| but the soup.me site no longer exists, so I'm not certain.
| Their inactive Twitter account (https://twitter.com/soup_me)
| does have an identical logo and a location of Vienna (same as
| soup.io), so it's probably true that it's the same company.
|
| That's definitely a much larger amount of VC, and would make it
| even less possible for "sustainable" to be an acceptable end
| goal for the site.
| reificator wrote:
| > _FInally, i 'll point to my favorite post on the subject,
| Don't be a free user by idlewords:
| https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/*
|
| I used to believe this. Now Google Play Music is dead despite
| my $20/month.
| topicseed wrote:
| Dead? They just have two competing products, the older Google
| Play Music, and the more modern YouTube Music. The app is
| dead, but the Music Streaming Service by Google is still
| here, under a different name, and at a similar price.
| BEEdwards wrote:
| Youtube music isn't an equivalent product.
|
| Frankly it's garbage and when they finally pull the trigger
| and kill google music I'm going to stop paying them.
| topicseed wrote:
| Definitely a bit different but as a whole, it's
| performing the same task for me. Stream songs I like, and
| I get the ad-free YT perk!
|
| I actually switched to YT Music a year ago as I preferred
| the UX. But it's indeed subjective.
| nikanj wrote:
| Google doesn't need more money. It's sometimes a blessing, as
| unprofitable projects face no pressure, but sometimes a curse
| because profits don't motivate them to keep products alive
| EdJiang wrote:
| Even if hosting costs weren't a problem, doesn't the complexity
| of maintaining Soup sound like a bigger one?
|
| > This is also the reason why we dropped the idea of open-
| sourcing soup. It's too complex to maintain and to hand-over.
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| What is it? The site makes no effort to explain what it is or
| did.
| true_religion wrote:
| What's the point of their explaining what it did when they are
| closing down?
| pndy wrote:
| It was a microblogging platform; it had a chance to become a
| worthy competitor to tumblr from Europe but sadly, instead of
| gaining funding, it got spambots. Over the last 10 years a
| devoted community managed to grow around the site - it's hard
| to say how large in numbers but now it seems it wasn't enough
| to keep service running.
| VectorLock wrote:
| Spammers really do ruin everything. The guy who acquired
| delicious says as soon as he turned it back on after several
| years of read-only mode it immediately started getting
| hammered by spambots again.
| https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1281285876388106247
| pndy wrote:
| There were periods on soup when main activity stream named
| here _everyone_ was filled with nothing but some spambot
| posts; most likely these were green-lighted by staff itself
| up until few last months when they tried to introduce
| premium accounts, while basic ones were supposed to come
| with ads (disguised as native posts) and tracking. Majority
| of users were angered when a big banners shaming them for
| using adblocking and tracking extensions were introduced.
| mrtksn wrote:
| what's so hard about keeping spambots out? not all sites
| seems to suffer from spambots after all.
| mdoms wrote:
| Those are all GET requests, how can you attribute that to
| spammers? Seems like crawlers, aggregators etc are more
| likely.
| floatingatoll wrote:
| Did they charge money to use it?
| tzs wrote:
| For reasons I've never been able to understand many sites that
| have a separate subdomain for news and blogging about the site
| either do not have any kind of link on the blogging site back
| to the main site, or do but fail to make it obvious.
|
| In this case the main site is https://www.soup.io/ and the
| submitted story is to their news/blog site at kitchen.soup.io.
| Go to the main site and it is clear there what they do.
|
| There is actually a link to that at kitchen.soup.io, but it is
| easy to miss. It's the small red circled "soup" in the very
| upper right.
| k33n wrote:
| All my posts about how pathetic this is keep getting flagged so
| I'll just keep making posts in the best interest of entrepreneurs
| everywhere. They have millions of users and just "gave up".
| Nobody should feel bad for them.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2020-07-11 23:00 UTC)