> I personally don't feel like he was berating GoChat

You don't feel that way because he edited his article and in its original form it was VERY uncharitable to GoChat. Now, after the edits, it's only lying by claiming they're similar in performance profile, when in reality, in terms of realtime performance, GoChat is all GoSnap does PLUS a lot more extra work.

And "oh, look, they spend $4,000 a month on servers, and I only spent $100/month on a server. Plus 'cheap' storage from Google, that I'm not going to enumerate for some reason"

A screenshot on my iPhone 6S of Pokemon Go (just the map) is 3.7MB, if we extrapolate we are talking about 722.66 GB of images so far (using his 200K images estimate) we are talking about < $20/month for the storage and ~$80/mo for the bandwidth (Sharing them back out, ingress is free). Now this is early days for GoSnaps so it's hard to predict if those users will stay but to the author's own point he has to keep all of the pictures so that number will only grow. It is disingenuous to completely leave out a cost of the service which looks like it has already probably doubled his cost per month from his "Only $100 for a server" claim. Also I'll point out they may be compressing/downsizing the hell out of those photos but I can't tell how much each one will weigh without MitM-ing the app and I don't care that much.

For sure - I certainly wouldn't expect that it'd come close in hosting costs, but when the author is as snarky as he was about how cheap, then he should expect to be called out.

And besides (leaving aside the numerous other 'issues' with the claim, as well discussed here) is "My $200/mo stack performs better than a $4000/mo stack" really that much worse than $100?