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)
They 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.
Let 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.
Egress 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.
6 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.
AWS 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.
