They 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.
I'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.
I 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.
What is it? The site makes no effort to explain what it is or did.
I wrote a very simple soup content downloader some time ago, you can get it here: 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.
Why 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?
I 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/
Anyway if anyone has advice i'm all ears :)
Link is now taken down, but last I heard, they were selling the soup.io domain for $40k 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%2...
Why 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.
This 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
Reading 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)
So 10 days to let users get their data and Archive Team to do their thing? Kind of shitty.
I 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?
18k/year with 6 mil users is... 0.003 euro per user per year? Certainly even running ads would meaningfully improve this.
Haven'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.
I 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.
What part of this site couldn’t be served off a laptop in a closet?
Does archive.org plan on backing it up?
I 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/