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A comment on Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business you heard of in 2019?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business ... by aerovistae on Monday December 30, 2019 @01:21PM (#21915463)
This is super interesting to me. I have a couple questions! Although, by the way, found a typo on your /api page-- "The power behind MAC Vendors API is it's simplicity. Get started instantly, no registration required." That should be `its`, not `it's`.

Anyway, this whole thing confuses the hell out of me. You're receiving 3.6 billion requests per year and you've been serving it all for free with a single adsense ad and only making a couple grand a month off of it? I feel like I don't really understand. Shouldn't the hosting costs for multiple billions of requests be huge? Shouldn't you be charging for that? I'm speaking as someone who's never built anything like this, so I don't really know.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business ... by stanmancan on Monday December 30, 2019 @04:59PM (#21917051)
300 million a month only works out to around 115 a second. The API has been optimized a lot. We could probably handle 2x the traffic we are currently getting before needing to upgrade the server.

We do have paid accounts now but it doesn’t amount to a ton, around $440MRR.

I hesitated adding paid accounts for a long time because it cost so little to run but the ad revenue was alright.

Lots of niche markets out there, but my at revenue did take a long, slow path over 8 years to get to this point.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business ... by _-___________-_ on Tuesday December 31, 2019 @02:19PM (#21923729)
It really doesn't need to be expensive to serve hundreds-to-thousands of requests per second. Despite what some people will tell you, that's not actually very significant load.
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Re:Ask HN: Which is the most successful one-person business ... by lossolo on Monday December 30, 2019 @04:31PM (#21916890)
I am serving around 3 billion requests a month (so around 10x more than OP) from one dedicated server that cost less than 100 euro a month.
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