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Soup.io Will Be Discontinued
- sigio 6y agoReading 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 6y agoThey say here[0]: We are currently paying near the 10,000€ mark per month and our revenue streams are at 1,500€. 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-feedback https://kitchen.soup.io/post/696542642/Thanks-for-your-feedb...
- momokoko 6y agoLet 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.
- csunbird 6y agoEgress costs of AWS are straight up robbery. 0.05 per GB (assuming you use that much bandwidth, otherwise it is even higher) adds up very quickly when you have a lot of users and page clicks.
- rhizome 6y ago> 10,000€ mark per month holy chowder!
- mad182 6y agoAWS 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 6y agoAbsolutely, and "can I see the billing" is one of the first questions I ask in my head whenever some new platform technology is announced.
- pndy 6y ago6 mln registered accounts - sure that's totally possible but real users number was definitely way lower than that. The banner with premium membership [1] posted on discord shows 17 purchases out of 200 offered by price of 988 PLN which is approx. 250€ and 221USD. [1] - https://i.imgur.com/h2NzFF1.png https://i.imgur.com/h2NzFF1.png
- thestepafter 6y agoWhy 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?
- DangerousPie 6y agoPresumably they tried and failed.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoOr 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 6y agoIf 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 6y ago> 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 6y agoYou 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23805099
- urxvtcd 6y agoI wrote a very simple soup content downloader some time ago, you can get it here: https://github.com/urxvtcd/soup-io-downloader 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.
- ikari_pl 6y agoI'm working on my own (don't trust noone), that parses everything into a neater JSON file that I can use later. I download the files with just bash magic. https://github.com/ikari-pl/downsouper https://github.com/ikari-pl/downsouper Still has some downsides, but getting better. It doesn't download the posts from discussions yet. You can get your own posts and links to full-size images (no resize means both better quality AND faster download), includes the jq-xargs-wget pipes I used. Then I want to add an exporter that would be able to convert it to, whatever, wordpress export format? Cry and go to tumblr? No idea. :(
- klaude 6y agoI'm afraid that they will be gone sooner if folks start to download their contents in bulks :(
- ikari_pl 6y agoWhat else can we do. What else. Surprisingly enough, the assets are on an awesome CDN. Getting the HTMLs took me ~8 hours. Getting 19 GB of images - maybe 10 minutes?
- lloydatkinson 6y agoWhat is it? The site makes no effort to explain what it is or did.
- pndy 6y agoIt 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 6y agoSpammers 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 https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1281285876388106247
- pndy 6y agoThere 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 6y agowhat’s so hard about keeping spambots out? not all sites seems to suffer from spambots after all.
- pndy 6y agoSite was always pretty much left alone beside serious issues like hardware failure that wiped most of the content from 2016; my problem with being unable to load and post within a particular group was never resolved (I was a member and confirmed to never being on blacklist; obviously the group always loaded within private mode without issues). The simplicity of account registration, the possibility of creating sub-profiles within main one (similar to tumblr) were probably the sources of spambot thriving on soup. While we had post report and flagging features, only ignoring was the best way of getting rid of all that trash.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- k33n 6y agoEuropeans just don't have the grit to forge ahead like Americans do. Kind of pathetic when you consider they have millions of users.
- k33n 6y agoSince 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 6y agoThis is not much better.
- k33n 6y agoThe truth hurts. Learn from it!
- the-dude 6y agoYou are a self absorbed, misinformed, nationalistic prick. Do whatever you want to do with it.
- k33n 6y agoNext 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 6y agoPlease 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You can also email us at hn@ycombinator.com to be sure that we know about it.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
- k33n 6y agoIf 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.
- MattGaiser 6y agoI 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 6y agoWell 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 6y agoThat's the real issue. Even if all costs are zero, €18k/yr really isn't that much.
- pndy 6y agoIf 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.
- jarym 6y agoI 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 6y agoOn 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 6y agoMissed 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 6y agoTheir 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 6y agoAll 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.
- jlokier 6y agoThey report 10k€ monthly costs and 1.5k€ 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 1.5k€ 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.
- fxtentacle 6y agoI 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 6y ago> 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 6y agoMinIO has an S3 compatible API: https://docs.min.io/docs/aws-cli-with-minio.html https://docs.min.io/docs/aws-cli-with-minio.html
- 6y ago
- jermier 6y agoThis 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 6y agoWho’s going to pay for that?
- chewzerita 6y agoOP 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/ https://archive.org/ [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/ https://old.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zucker42 6y agoThe Internet archive...or just individuals sharing the cost.
- PhantomGremlin 6y ago
- k33n 6y agoThis 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 6y agoPlease 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules from now on, we'd be grateful.
- ALittleLight 6y agoI'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.
- JustARandomGuy 6y agoI 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/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
- bilbo0s 6y agoI 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 6y ago>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.
- kd5bjo 6y ago> Are the users freeloaders, or is the product just not compelling enough to attract paying users? There’s no cognitive dissonance in believing both of these things at the same time. The non-paying users are freeloaders because they’re gaining value with no intention of paying for it. The service isn’t compelling enough because, despite all of the attention it’s getting, it can’t attract paying customers. They’re both causative to some degree, but from the entrepreneuer’s perspective, there’s nothing that can be done about human nature— you just have to account for it when designing your offerings.
- surround 6y agoDoes archive.org plan on backing it up?
- pndy 6y agoIt's the last 9 days for soup until it finally boils out; users from what I can see on discord are trying to backup their accounts with tools made by other users and most of them seems to have troubles achieving that. Servers were never particularly in a good shape - most of the times we could see 502 and 503 errors. Amount of user posts, spambot trash would made rather pointless for achive.org to scrap soup content, I believe
- chubs 6y agoI posted the thoughts after another similar blogging service died, and I still think it's relevant: This is one of the main reasons I tried garnering interest around a blogging app idea I had: If you write with a third party service such as soup.io, eventually your writings will go away due to an acquihire, company shutdown, merger, or 'it became too expensive to run' in this case. If you want to write seriously with a multi-decade perspective, you need to host it yourself, and I wanted to make that easy to manage for an average Joe. Unfortunately I haven't had any luck gathering interest! Technical people understand the idea but just roll their own using eg Jekyll; and Non-technical people don't get the idea, or dont seem to care: they post on eg soup, their writings last a few years then vanish, they shrug and move on. I worry that it's a cultural thing: Few people care for the permanence of deep thoughts, and that's a big pity. The idea is here: http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/ http://www.splinter.com.au/2020/06/07/chalkinator/ Anyway if anyone has advice i'm all ears :)
- ghufran_syed 6y agoI use posthaven.com, they seem to be trying to address the same problem
- dan1234 6y agoI wonder if the native app could use something like Terraform to manage the hosting on the user’s behalf? They’d need to register an account with a supported provider and do the initial domain registration & dns pointing, but a step by step guide could be made for that.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ivalm 6y ago18k/year with 6 mil users is... 0.003 euro per user per year? Certainly even running ads would meaningfully improve this.
- nacs 6y agoI think the majority of those users aren't active. I saw somewhere that only around 20K users are actually active.
- ivalm 6y agothen why do you need 10k/month to support traffic for 20k users. Their numbers really don't make sense on either side.
- nacs 6y agoIt doesn't sound right to me either. They claim 10K per month in just hosting fees but the owner of Soup ("Euphoria hosting") is actually a hosting business. Maybe they're charging themselves a bunch of money (perhaps as a tax write off).
- lilyball 6y agoWhy is a site that has been around for 13 years announcing an abrupt closure with a mere 10 days notice? If this is due to money (like they said) then they could have predicted this significantly earlier and chosen to notify the community with a more reasonable time frame.
- lentilslist 6y agoI know this is off-topic but since this startup is gone let's talk about their domain name potential for a second. A real soup startup could exist where outdoor (on plastic) pressure cooker based temporary kitchen operations could create a monthly soup festival / contest with pressure canning standards and inspectors on premises. It sounds like a festival and not a technology company at first, and I admit that the Atlanta Chili Cook-off (atlantachilicookoff.com) is similar, but imagine something like this with an app designed to enable monthly soup distribution teams who collect order forms during each cook-off type event. They could deliver the soup through the app during each cook-off event or through the mail. Because soup is limited in how it is produced a standards based environment (based on pressure cookers / canners) could enable swift build-outs of kitchens on grass and plastic tarps each of which could utilize propane and cook soup with a process that is designed to ease inspection through conforming to a standard that the app explains. Food hygiene inspectors could be present and essentially all kitchen processes could be better inspected than any restaurant during this event (in theory) where massive amounts of soup could be produced and then pressure canned. This could be a distribution hub for homelessness if a donor model was included to help there be free cans as well as a subscriber model so that each team could have a monthly recurring revenue based on their popularity where they are doing everything during the event except procuring ingredients from farmers markets and whatnot. You can have a dozen pressure canners lined up next to each other and make a heck of a lot of soup all at once unlike what you can do with bread, or many different types of food. This should enable a new type of festival to exist. Anyone could be a chef with this model if they knew their ingredients like that back of their hand and they practiced with a pressure cooker at home until they had it down pat. They could lease pressure canning and/or cooking infrastructure during the event to reach their goals if they qualify in and stay popular. Please feel free to run with this idea if you think you can move it forward. I simply am busy with other projects. Others have probably thought of this before, and I'm probably missing something, but I'm just seeing what people think.
- unicornporn 6y agoSo 10 days to let users get their data and Archive Team to do their thing? Kind of shitty.
- classics2 6y agoWhat part of this site couldn’t be served off a laptop in a closet?
- lgats 6y agoLink is now taken down, but last I heard, they were selling the soup.io domain for $40k https://flippa.com/10566726-advertising-entertainment https://flippa.com/10566726-advertising-entertainment The owners listed the domain on flippa asking for 40k+ and stated they had an existing offer of $40k and wanted to see if they could get a better offer from flippa buyers. update: minimal listing details are available from bing cache: https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3A%2F%2Fflippa.com%2F10566726-advertising-entertainment&d=4972610080867914&mkt=en-US&setlang=en-US&w=f-LLl3MirfbVSGwDnhAjoJstO7r7lxoM https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=https%3A%2F%2Fflippa.com%2...
- klaude 6y agoHaven't they tried donations? I think that users would throw some monies for running their beloved service like soup. I think for such site it would be better solution than paid accounts or even ads.