Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail'
95 points
1 hour ago
| 18 comments
| threads.com
| HN
heipei
27 minutes ago
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The post said 450 million pageviews, likely since November. If we make very generous assumptions and assume that each pageview is a megabyte (very generous based on my own experience scanning billions of websites), then that's 450TB total in traffic. If you really did 450TB per month in traffic, you would need slightly more than one gigabit line (and hence VPS), but not more than two. With Hetzner the traffic would cost you €450 or $535.

Did I get something wrong?

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SahAssar
13 minutes ago
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Well, https://jmail.world/jacebook-logo.png is 670KB by itself and loaded on initial load, so I think they might have blown your suggested traffic budget and still have some optimization to do.
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heipei
4 minutes ago
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Fair enough, I just loaded some pages and some of them are even bigger than 2MB. But then again those static resources would be cached client-side. So unless you have 450 million unique visitors who only ever go to one URL on your site, you are looking at significantly less per pageview. I reloaded the frontpage with caching enabled and it was ~ 30kB of data transfer.
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lexh
17 minutes ago
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Isn’t part of Vercel’s value proposition a robust global CDN in front? Seems quite a bit different than one sweaty VM in Helsinki.
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heipei
7 minutes ago
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Yes, and I didn't mean to imply that a single VPS is all you needed. But I wanted to put things into perspective for the other posters who claimed that you couldn't possibly serve a site like this from a single machine, purely in terms of performance.
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prodigycorp
1 hour ago
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What would this have costed had they used render or railway? Maybe, what, $200 a month?

Vercel's pricing is so ridiculously convoluted that you can't even cleanly compare usage. With render/railway/(insert provider of choice) you can at least predict that you're your biggest cost is going to be egress.

edit: I just saw that it gets 450m pageviews. I'm guessing on the upper end this costs ~$1k with railway + cloudflare?

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doublesocket
37 minutes ago
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Railway is getting so good I'm not sure what Vercel brings to the party anyway.
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mdrzn
1 hour ago
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1) Covering the ~$50k hosting bill for Jmail on Vercel sounds generous, but a self-hosted VPS on Hetzner could serve the same purpose for ~€30/month, which is orders of magnitude cheaper and avoids vendor lock-in.

2) This comes as the CEO of Vercel, Guillermo Rauch, is already facing community backlash for publicly supporting Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, a move that’s led to boycotts and migrations off the platform among developers. All my homies hate Vercel.

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throwaw12
38 minutes ago
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2nd point resonates with me, how come he wants to cover expenses, while being connected to Israeli PM and Epstein is connected to Israel through Ehud Barak.

Isn't he going to ask for a "favor"?

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dgrin91
57 minutes ago
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Do you really think a $30 hetzner host can sustain that level of traffic performantly? Don't get me wrong, I love hetzner, but I would be very surprised if the numbers work out there.
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Nextgrid
52 minutes ago
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Isn’t it just serving static content and the content fitting in RAM? If so your laptop can serve it just fine even.
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iOSThrowAway
48 minutes ago
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A laptop would have a hard time serve thousands of people hitting a single endpoint multiple times a day.
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EduardoBautista
40 minutes ago
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It shouldn't. The issue is that most developers would rather spin up another instance of their server than solve the performance issue in their code, so now it's a common belief that computers are really slow to serve content.

And we are talking about static content. You will be bottlenecked by bandwidth before you are ever bottlenecked by your laptop.

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eqvinox
43 minutes ago
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With a 2025 tech stack, yes. With a 2005 tech stack, no. Don't use any containers, no[/limited] server-side dynamic script languages, no microservices or anything like that.

Considering the content is essentially static, this is actually viable. Search functions might be a bit problematic, but that's a solvable problem.

Of course you pay with engineering skills and resources.

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eirpoeior
32 minutes ago
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Is there any feasible way to implement search client-side on a database of this scale?

I guess you would need some sort of search term to document id mapping that gets downloaded to the browser but maybe there's something more efficient than trying to figure out what everyone might be searching for in advance?

And how would you do searching for phrases or substrings? I've no idea if that's doable without having a database server-side that has the whole document store to search through.

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ffsm8
20 minutes ago
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Theoretically, just thinking about the problem... You could probably embrace offline first and sync to indexeddb? After that search would become simple to query. Obviously comes with it's own challenges, depending on your user base (e.g. not a good idea if it's only a temporary login etc)
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namibj
20 minutes ago
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There are several implementations of backing an Sqlite3 database with a lazy loaded then cached network storage, including multiple that work over HTTP (iirc usually with range requests). Those basically just work.
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stackskipton
19 minutes ago
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SRE here, Containers are not causing any performance problem.
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eddythompson80
40 minutes ago
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No it won't. This is static content we're talking about. The only thing limiting you is your network throughput and maybe disk IO (assuming it doesn't fit in a compressed RAM). Even for an "around the globe roundtrip" latency, we're still talking few hundred msec.

Some cloud products have distorted an entire generation of developers understanding of how services can scale.

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computomatic
43 minutes ago
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I think it’s more helpful to discuss this in requests per second.

I’d interpret “thousands of people hitting a single endpoint multiple times a day” as something like 10,000 people making ~5 requests per 24 hours. That’s 0.5 requests per second.

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lanyard-textile
44 minutes ago
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It all depends of course, but generally no, a laptop could handle that just fine.
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marginalia_nu
21 minutes ago
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There may be a risk of running into thermal throttling in such a use-case, as laptops are really not designed for sustained loads of any variety. Some deal with it better than others, but few deal with it well.

Part of why this is a problem is that consumer grade NICs often tend to overload quite a lot of work to the CPU that higher end server specced NICs do themselves, as a laptop isn't really expected to have to keep up with 10K concurrent TCP connections.

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thomasfromcdnjs
40 minutes ago
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If it's mostly static, just cache it at the http level e.g. cloudflare which I believe wouldn't even charge for 450m requests on the $20 plan at least
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gnfargbl
31 minutes ago
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I would use a $100/mo box with a much better CPU and more RAM, but I think the pinch point might be the 1Gbps unmetered networking that Hetzner provide.

They will sell you a 10Gbps uplink however, with (very reasonably priced) metered bandwidth.

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blibble
54 minutes ago
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yes

and if it doesn't spawn up another $30 instance and add another RR entry to the dns

serving static content scales horizontally perfectly

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mdrzn
54 minutes ago
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For sure, even cheaper if you cache effectively.
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schnebbau
46 minutes ago
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Lol yes? It's all reads. If it can all fit in ram, great. Otherwise an SSD will do fine too.
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eqvinox
34 minutes ago
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You could probably serve it from the quad-core ARM64 inside the SSD controller, if you were trying "for the lulz".
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ExpertAdvisor01
45 minutes ago
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No . Hetzner would terminate your server as you are not a profitable customer.
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jkukul
38 minutes ago
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A profitable customer? How would Hetzner know if you're profitable or not?

I've hosted side projects on Hetzner for years and have never experienced anything like that. Do you have any references of projects to which it happened?

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ExpertAdvisor01
29 minutes ago
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Because you are using an incredibly large amount of bandwidth for €30 a month.

They offer unlimited bandwidth with their dedicated servers under a “fair usage” policy.

The bandwidth costs would be higher than what you pay monthly, so they would simply drop you.

You are probably using very little bandwidth, so it doesn’t matter in your case.

However, I assume Jmail consumes a very large amount of bandwidth.

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xyst
38 minutes ago
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I have heard of hetzner terminating customer relationships if too many legal complaints are filed against your VPSes.

But not because of being "not a profitable customer". Mind sharing some links here?

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ExpertAdvisor01
27 minutes ago
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gnfargbl
20 minutes ago
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I am not sure how one even gets 250TB/mo through a 1Gbps link. In any case, completely saturating your networking for the full month is outside most people's definition of "fair use".
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xyst
40 minutes ago
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Even before the Vercel CEO supporting a genocidal maniac. Vercel as a platform has been silently giving open source projects a "fuck you, pay me" when it comes to renewing benefits.

Have seen it happen to smaller projects and even pointed it out when Vercel took static sites down.

So they have always had a bad rep in my opinion.

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kid64
44 minutes ago
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$50k and €30 are of the same order of magnitude.
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graypegg
39 minutes ago
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This is offtopic honestly, but I'm curious if I've been using this phrase wrong for my whole life. Doesn't "order of magnitude" refer to steps of powers of ten?

$50000 vs €30. (or €42066.30 vs €30 if I normalize the currency) 5x10^4 vs 3x10^1.

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appreciatorBus
34 minutes ago
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You have it right, perhaps the original poster was referring to it in a more colloquial manner, in the sense that against 200 million in revenue, 50,000 and 30 are in the same ballpark?
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NoxiousPluK
10 minutes ago
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I took it as a joke about the USD/EUR exchange rate ;)
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an0malous
44 minutes ago
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Isn't Jmail a static site? How could the bill be $47k?
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INTPenis
16 minutes ago
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There is still a helluva lot of data to transfer to the client, I'm sure it's being stored somewhere.

And with the entire world perusing this archive, I'm sure the costs will be very high, regardless of provider.

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bgirard
25 minutes ago
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That's a good question. As someone bootstraping a few projects on Vercel this post has me looking over at the pricing sheet more closely.
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ExpertAdvisor01
26 minutes ago
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Bandwith costs
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mhitza
1 hour ago
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Unreadable without an instagram/threads account
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plasticsoprano
1 hour ago
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jmclnx
1 hour ago
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With noscript active, I was able to see most of it.

>Vercel's CEO offers to cover expenses of 'Jmail' as it has become the number 1 site for tracking the Epstein files

and the expense is 46,486 USD. He said he is happy to cover expenses and that Vercel worked good for your needs.

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selimonder
49 minutes ago
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Boo is the only think i can imagine when I hear about Vercel
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igneo676
1 hour ago
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Rather than linking to a threads post that is a screenshot of the x.com post with little to no commentary, we should be linking to the original x.com post

https://x.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622

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bstsb
55 minutes ago
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or to a nitter instance, where you can actually read responses without signing in:

https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622 or https://nitter.net/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622

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crote
54 minutes ago
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Considering that Twitter doesn't show the original post for non-logged-in users, the screenshot on Threads actually provides a better reading experience for most people!
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opello
50 minutes ago
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It seems like sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't, and I can only imagine popularity is somehow the reason.
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theultdev
52 minutes ago
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You're missing a large part of the conversation and context if you don't at least link to the source.
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xyst
36 minutes ago
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for fucks sakes, don’t link twitter

Use nitter or xcancel

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theultdev
54 minutes ago
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Agreed, was slow to load and I just had to find the source post on X to view the real conversation "thread".

This is the first Threads link I've ever seen here. Is that what Threads mainly is, reposting X screenshots and starting a sidechain conversation?

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ryanjshaw
1 hour ago
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How does this work from an accounting perspective? They write off a bad debt, but the actual loss is likely multiple orders of magnitude less. Do they only get to write off up to the actuals?
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gunapologist99
47 minutes ago
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It's simply discounting the fees for that one user to zero.

(It's not writing off a bad debt, which is technically different)

So: your costs are still X but now your revenue is Y instead of Y + (that one user's fee which likely wasn't going to get paid anyway)

You pay taxes on Y - X (profit).

So, really, their costs just increased by whatever it cost to deliver that data (likely zero depending on how they're billed for it), and their revenue didn't change at all.

Turning a no-collect situation into a PR positive.

To be fair: it really depends on their datacenter environment; if they're physically hosting, this is probably a rounding error. But, if instead, they're actually running on top of AWS or another hyperscaler and paying 9 cents per gigabyte for traffic, then their bandwidth bill could actually be quite substantial and they're just passing that along to the customer. In that case, this could be actually quite generous of them.

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spIrr
43 minutes ago
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Yes, because accounts payable are valued at recognized revenue, and aren't being revalued at cost when written off.
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azhenley
1 hour ago
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You deduct the expenses you paid, not the income you hoped to earn.
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dolphinscorpion
1 hour ago
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Marketing probably, unless thew CEO pulls out his credit card
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mschuster91
1 hour ago
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Alternatively, bill the costs under the PR department as a marketing campaign.
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pdpi
40 minutes ago
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I suspect this sort of thing is some of the best marketing money can buy anyhow, so it's a bit of a no-brainer.
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fusslo
14 minutes ago
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I know there's a lot of questions why it's so expensive, but can I just extol the work done by Riley and team?

Since the Epstein files dropped they've cloned gmail, gdrive, gmessages, amazon orders, transcribed court proceedings (yes with AI), fights, facebook, and imessages.

It's an insane amount of work. They added the latest batch of files, photos, videos in like 2 weeks. And he's keeping up files that the justice department took down.

jmail has made it so much easier for everyone to explore the files.

I don't know how Riley has planned to monetize this or if it's simply for the public good. I can totally understand not wanting to optimize for cost from the outset. And I see a lot of abject criticism on every social media platform rather than constructive.

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aaviator42
1 hour ago
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I'm not the first to point this out but the website in question, which is mostly static, could easily be hosted on a VPS for at most a couple hundred dollars a month.
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tbeseda
36 minutes ago
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Directly to CDN. Put it in a CloudFront distribution and it would be a fraction of a fraction of that Vercel bill.

Remember kids, they're incentivized to get you to build something to burn as much compute as possible.

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hellogspot
37 minutes ago
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It's common to hear rumors about SF CEOs and their NDAs with young (but legal) ladies. I hope there's no irony here, g.
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sandworm101
14 minutes ago
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Public files needing to be distributed to a huge population of interested persons? Sounds like the perfect situation for an oldschool torrent. That's how large data leaks were handled back in my day. 450TB is peanuts for perhaps ten thousand peers on fast residential connections.
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mschuster91
1 hour ago
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It's a screenshot of this Twitter thread [1] for those who can't view Threads on mobile because it forces you to sign in.

[1] https://xcancel.com/rauchg/status/2020984434338693622

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altern8
1 hour ago
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Is that good PR?

Doesn't seem to be a good idea to be associated with that.

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ecshafer
53 minutes ago
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Why wouldn't it be good to be associated with publicly exposing pedophiles, cannibals, murderers, and rapists? That seems to be a very good thing to be opposed to them.
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detectivestory
56 minutes ago
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Its good PR. He had some pretty bad PR recently that caused a lot of people to boycott the service. I assume this is him trying to regain trust or something?
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aurareturn
44 minutes ago
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$46k for 470m page views.

That seems extremely expensive. What the heck?

Is he using Vercel Functions as well?

I think this is where some SPA + a few instances of a Node.js server + Redis would be much cheaper.

I'd say you can probably serve this much on $1k/month? It's simple content. It's not like it needs to do complex business logic in the backend.

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iamleppert
38 minutes ago
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Insane to me a bill that large for what is effectively hosting static content. He could dump the entire thing on S3 and even with cloudfront it would be fraction of that.
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ChrisArchitect
47 minutes ago
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gethly
1 hour ago
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in other words, "we know our product is overpriced as hell, so i will pay for it to avoid further exposure of our pricing model".
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ghjv
56 minutes ago
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this seems like an unreasonably unchartiable reading of a relatively chill and nice situation
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eqvinox
36 minutes ago
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I'm not sure I would describe the discourse around Vercel and its CEO as "relatively chill and nice". Things are perceived in context.
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