So you're saying I can hit 300k uniques per month for three months before being asked to upgrade to the team plan?
Even so, 300k uniques would price you around $80/mo, which seems extremely high to me for a casual blog that can be self hosted on a $5 DO instance and an hours worth of work.
In my opinion, a little bit of it is because of the "hipster premium". The same phenomenon that makes the same food/drink more expensive when served on a cutting board or in a jam jar.
I wish the suits from Ghost would weigh in on this, rather than all this conjecture. Can someone from Ghost team give us insight on why there is this disparity other than the obvious "humans must eat"
Did you not read the article? It spells out the reasoning very clearly.
"One key lesson we learned early on was not to charge too little. $5/month customers are just terrible. They have the highest rate of failed payments, the highest rate of credit card fraud, the highest amount of support tickets submitted, and are the least friendly people. We've doubled our prices 3x since then, and each time we do, we get nicer people who value the product more and create fewer problems.
At this point I would never create a business ever again which charges less than $10/month."
To me setting up a server/installation and maintenance is in the chore category of work so 1hr setup and say 15/min/month maintenance ~= 3 hrs/yr. Good programmer contracts can command $500/hr and the work might actually be fulfilling. 4hrs*$500 = $2000 pays for years of hosting.
Also you are not going to hit the top of HN on a regular basis as a casual blogger. Look at real data like your blog's historical traffic in the last year to get an accurate picture of the costs.
One should definetely consider the opportunity cost of taking matters into their own hands. However, I think the example is way over-the-top because of some reasons (most already stated by sibling comments):
* Not sure how many programming contracts can sustain a $500 hourly rate for long. If you can charge that, but can realistically only book 10% of the 'available' time, then your calculation should really be using $50, not $500.
* Example makes sense only if you're 100% booked all the time, with no spare hour here and there. If you have any sort of spare whatsoever, you can sell your unused production capacity to yourself at cost price.
* Even if you're 100% taken, not all consultant time is billable time. So that will already reduce your estimate by about 50% or so alone.
* Managing stuff takes time (and is a common full-time profession). Your example didn't account the time you will take setting up whichever third party solution you choose. Unless you have hired someone who you can just take five seconds to say 'get me set up on X and tell me when you're done' (and can be trusted to do it right without taking time to supervise/course-correct), you will perform work in setting up the platform. This work may very well take a non-insignificant fraction of the time you would take by not outsourcing, which you didn't consider in your calculation.
You may very well really hate setting up servers, and gladly pay a large sum to not do it. But then you're really paying to avoid pain, and the whole opportunity cost argument you made may be a rationalization.
>To me setting up a server/installation and maintenance is in the chore category of work so 1hr setup and say 15/min/month maintenance ~= 3 hrs/yr. Good programmer contracts can command $500/hr and the work might actually be fulfilling. 4hrs$500 = $2000 pays for years of hosting.*
The vast majority of programmers in the world (and even in the US) will never see anything $500 for 4 hours of work () (and if they do it would be some one-off lucky gig), so that's a moot point.
Ok I know this is possible, but how common is this really? I guess this might be a little bit more typical for very short contracts, like one-off work, but still.
Is that $500/h freelancer/contractor fee? Because that seems absurdly high for someone on a payroll no matter how much of a rockstar they are.
If so, then you have to factor in all the non-billable hours you spend getting clients/contracts, advertising, and general housekeeping required to run a company. Then stuff like health care, car, phone, computer, electricity, office and other expenses.
Just saying that you can't just say: "my time is worth $500/hr" if that's what you bill for 4 hours a day for a client for few weeks.
