600k year for 2-3 is only real in the silicon valley bubble. You could get just as talented of a team from a Nordic Country for example and only pay 120kish

Realistically the costs for the company are higher. At least in The Netherlands the total costs for the employer is between 2-3x because of social security, health insurance, pension, housing/office costs.

I've been an employer in NL for close to 30 years and the 2-3x fully loaded is not supported by any data that I'm aware of. 1.5 or so is more like it.

Not even close to true. Especially when comparing California with EU countries, even high tax rate ones. The difference between net salary and what company pays is actually very similar.

I have experience with Belgium, the 2 - 3x ratio is only true when considering the net wage of the employee.

> 600k year for 2-3 is only real in the silicon valley bubble.

Nope. You're forgetting the cost to the company is the burdened labor cost (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_burden), not just wages. Payroll taxes, benefits, office space and equipment, etc. can add another 30-40% to the cost of wages.

Im not forgetting labor cost. I would actually say payroll tax, benefits and office space are even higher in California than any European country.

Can confirm. In fact, you can get talented people starting at 70k. Hire some remotes. Most local companies can only offer non-inspiring typical enterprise work, and that's why you can get people at such low cost.

600k a year gets you at least five good developers in Berlin.

And 10-12 in Poznan or Warsaw.

And some projects really are just simple. Scale makes no difference to their services, it's a basic OLTP + search with resizing image proxy.

This doesn't have any SLAs nor is it critical software either. 24/7 oncall is completely unnecessary.

Don‘t underestimate the massive cpu power needed for scaling images at their request rate

We run an ad platform that resizes, crops to the important section, transforms with text, and more with billions of requests per day. It's very cacheable, horizontally scalable, and CPU is cheap.

The main scaling challenge here is serving and bandwidth, both of which are handled by their CDN. I expect 5 figure costs for that but the rest of the platform is very expensive.

Wonder if they could use S3 bucket with a lambda to resize. I’m sure their images are a long tail so certain images likely have way more traffic than others. At a previous company where we were also doing a lot of imgix traffic we did something like this but with a go service but now I’d just offload to s3 and use lambda to avoid Devops..

I’ve done exactly this. But not at any scale. But if they are specializing in this and with low margins, AWS is not the answer. The compute cost would be relatively cheap and possibly even the storage cost. I would think that the bandwidth costs would be expensive.

A friend of mine runs a site which uses aws s3 and lambda resizing, but cache is via BunnyCDN. His costs are low after moving from aws cloudfront, and he’s serving ~400m images a day. (This is run by a company of 2 staff)

Just because everything is in AWS doesn’t force you to use all of AWS services.

Do you happen to have a link?

hey man, nice seeing you here.

Why would it depend on request rate rather than upload rate? Just pre-scale several variants on upload. Then run an MR job every now and then and delete the variants that haven't been touched for more than e.g. a month. Scale those on demand, store recents and frequently accessed pre-scaled. This is literally a few days of work.

It's much nicer to be able to resize on demand. Many CDNs and image/file hosting services offer transform abilities via URL which makes it easy to get exactly what you need and optimize for every site and device.

But since images are immutable, this is a perfect use-case for lambda functions fronted by a CDN.

I bet there's a very long tail, i.e. the majority of images are rarely accessed, if ever.

Maybe some caching would help.

I just had a look at your b2b site

Do you actually run pay-per-action campaigns, or do you provide a dashboard for the customer data ?

We started as a native ad network and have pivoted to B2B with our own proprietary B2B data, which then powers a platform to run campaigns for marketers, and intel for sales teams. We also have a legacy adnetwork business for publishers.