How Much would it Cost to make it "Free for Open Source"?

[nelsonic]

One of the great ways to get adoption for any service (on GitHub) is to make it available for "free" for Open Source projects.

Assuming

I did a quick simulation of the ("medium term") cost (per month) using the following factors:

• 10TB (10,000GB) of storage (that's a LOT of data...)
• 10,000,000 (10 Million) PUT requests (to save the data. 10M comments/updates per month)
• 10,000,000 (10 Million) GET requests (to view past issue comments)
• 0 transfer in/out fees if we host the application on AWS see links below.

Projected Cost: $283.86/Month

https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

Considerations:

• All S3 Costs are "Pay As You Go", so we will only spend the money if/when the service is popular.
  • In the beginning (MVP) it will be $5/month to test the idea.
• Most people will not click on the link to view the "History" of a given issue/PR comment.
  • However ALL will see the "Meta Table" displaying the "stats" for the issue.
• The people who will click the link will likely only view a single issue at a time.

The way we need to think about this cost is "Marketing". If we end up with zero paying customers and we're "burning" $300/month on S3 costs, we can always email all the people using the service for "free" and ask them to help spread the word.

Background Reading:

• https://blog.cloudability.com/aws-s3-understanding-cloud-storage-costs-to-save/
• https://www.quora.com/Is-there-data-transfer-cost-between-AWS-S3-and-EC2-within-the-same-availability-zone