"I completely underestimated how much work it takes to build a business. There's so much overhead. I'm always figuring out why a build failed, taxes, how to triage issues, responding to support, designing UIs, responding to Apple's complaints, and more. There's so much that goes on behind the scenes. There's no way a single person can possible do this alone, especially as a side project."
This is the part that resonates a lot with me even though I have been able to build a small business that is reasonably successful with a small team but it takes a toll. It is a frikin slog and there are days when you feel like jumping off a cliff. Also the cost of doing something so small can add up when you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy. To do your own thing requires a very different mindset and incredibly hard.
There is a HUGE difference between building a quick side project for fun VS turning it into a real business (no matter how small). I have full sympathy for the owner and totally understand where they are coming from. No judgement and I wish them all the best.
you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy
Some of these claims seem to come from people living on a different planet to me.
Yes you can make that, but only if you are in a tiny (and normally very privileged) set.
The way it's breezily posted on this forum at times shows perhaps just a leeetle disconnect with the mainstream tech world
I agree with you, but I appreciate that people on HN talk like this because then I am presented to this world of privileges. It shows to me that this world exists and I might benefit from it. That happened to me.
Instead of anchoring myself to what Brazilian companies pay for developers, I focused on getting a remote job at a US company. One that would anchor themselves among their peers around SV, LA, NY. Now I earn about 12x more than when I started as a junior when I started 5 years ago. I earn about 3x more than if I was lucky to get the best paying job for my experience level here in my city.
This 3x salary increase is very related to knowing that this privileged world existed, which is mainly HN’s fault in my case.
Bear in mind that I am not earning close to USD200k (but six digits). I learned around here that FAANG salaries exists, but then I decided that those are not for me. But that’s a conscious decision. A much better position of not even knowing this exists.
Whitexican problems we call it here in Mexico: I'm in a similar position. 6 digit USD salary while living in Mexico. My problem is that I've been wanting to setup a business: real life like a gym, a store or similar.
The issue is that there's no way I'll get as much money as what I'm earning now... and I know building the business will require insurmountable efforts.
So I'm reduced to keep working in IT, wait until my good luck ends and hopefully be able to retire around 45
You are not "reduced" to do that. You are making that choice, that's all. Nobody is forcing you. If you badly wanted to create a business, you'd just go ahead and do it.
regardless of whether or not you believe it's just "making that choice," completely discrediting somebody's claim the effort is insurmountable _to them_ makes you a breaker of Rule 1
Well it is objectively surmountable and if it personally isn’t to them that means that the money is more important to them than achieving that goal to make a business. I don’t see how this isn’t a choice? “I’m not doing it since the insecurity of not having a high income is scarier than my desire to open a business”
That said I do bet that if you try to do your thing and it really doesn’t work out you probably can go back to software afterwards if you’re open to the risk of burning through your savings in the process.
Most people in his country put food on family table without US-level software developer salary. It's hard to lower expectations of life quality, but let's not dramatize.
Lol i came back to my comment and saw this thread... English is not my first language so you are right, I'm sorry my choice of word got people worked up.
I am curious… why do you want to start a business? It seems like so much work for less pay. Why is the option of working until you retire early a bad thing?
Not the OP but I'd love to do something that contributes to the local community in a more tangible way than my current $BIGTECH job. I'd love to start a dance studio, a cafe/bookstore, a makerspace. But it'd be a huge pay cut, assuming I could even make a successful business out of it.
Your paying higher taxes contributes likely more to the community than another store.
Your paying a local charity usually does much more to the community than even running a gym.
If you run a store or a cafe by just paying locals to work in it, using a part of your high wages, it's pretty helpful. But see the charity above; maybe it's better to support e.g. educators.
In general, your community is never better off if you suddenly become poorer.
Using the money to pay others to start more local schools, maybe a free coding bootcamp (with entrance tests), maybe maybe could be a high impact thing to do?
Or a charity yes (unless of course it's sth like a SPA for dogs)
It's just because I've been working in Technology all my life. I've got a PhD in CompSci, I've grown the tech teams of 2 startups, I've worked in different areas... and I just dont really find it that fulfilling anymore. The pay is outrageously good... but at this point it's mainly just that. After 20 years of doing it, it just isnt the same.
> Instead of anchoring myself to what Brazilian companies pay for developers, I focused on getting a remote job at a US company. One that would anchor themselves among their peers around SV, LA, NY.
My read on that is that it is total comp, so it includes bonuses/RSUs/options. If you're not negotiating for those things, what are you doing. Though $200k base salary is not a crazy salary for a staff/principle/high-level engineer.
I don't think people realize how corrosive to mental health a $200k engineering job can be though. I was making very close to that as a base salary, and the amount of responsibilities I had, that all directly contributed to the success of the organization and the engineering team, was frankly staggering. I was always available, even when I wasn't "on call." I was always putting out very important fires. It never ended.
Even in Berlin, with all the talks about it becoming a top destination for tech people, I'm yet to hear any 6-figures offer. Even the blockchain companies that were flush with cash were paying 90-95k€ to their top people, maybe a 10-20% performance bonus. Mind you, we are talking about Germany where the tax is ~42% of your income at this bracket if you are single.
When I was freelancing, pay was higher, but my best year hit around 130k€ net income, and that only because I deferred a lot of it and got an accountant that advised me to put as much as possible into a private pension fund to have a bigger tax deduction. If I wanted to have that cash in hand, I would've ended up with maybe 80k€?
Yes, cost of living is lower (though rapidly rising, and it is not a post-pandemic thing) and there is plenty of social welfare benefits. Especially after having kids, I wouldn't go to the US for a $200k/year job. But to think that this kind of compensation is par for the course shows a huge disconnect from the reality in the rest of world.
I've personally worked with people who I know made 6-figures of total comp in Germany. Checking the relatively-new https://techpays.eu/, there are plenty of 6-figure entries for Germany. I'm not saying this means it's the norm, just that it's achievable for people whose posts make it to the front page of Hacker News.
You mentioned taxes. When people talk about comp in the US, we aren't taking out taxes. Effective tax rate (federal+state+fica) for a single individual making $200k of salary+bonus is ~30% here. That would turn $200k into $140k take home.
30% is just federal. State can add between 0%-10% on top of that. So depending on where you live it may be very close to Germany. Then there's medical insurance, which is usually paid out of a portion of your paycheck. It's optional, but it would be a poor risk/reward tradeoff for even for a young healthy person to not at least have a high deductable plan, which will be another 3-4% of $200k.
I'll mention this not to disagree with your overall point, but because I've seen it be a source of confusion for some people. In the US federal income tax system, the marginal tax rate varies depending on the tax bracket each dollar of your income falls in.
That is, someone making $200k would pay 10% on their first $9,950 of income, 12% on their next $30,575 of income, and so on. They'd only pay a rate above 30% for the last $35,075 of their income.
I think the parent above you is talking without taking out taxes. For 90K, you would pay (taxes+health insurance + pension+unemployment benefit) ~42%. So at the end, what you see in your account ~52K/year. This is as a single person. For family/kids, you can make little bit more.
In Germany you may want to consider that the employer pays another approx. 20% on top of your salary, by law. So if your salary is EUR 100k, your employer actually pays 120k to keep you on board. Money that your employer could otherwise add to your payout as he’s paying all off it anyway _for_ you, right?
Now with 42% income tax of a 100k salary, there’s a net of 58k arriving at your bank account over a year.
Given that your employer pays 120k, you have actually “lost” 62k (not just 42k) to the government and insurances. With that maths, the _net_ tax (incl. insurances) is actually close to 52%. That is a whopping net +10% taxes from the math in the parent post.
> "Now with 42% income tax of a 100k salary, there’s a net of 58k arriving at your bank account over a year."
Oh boy, that's one of those misconceptions I'm really sick of. "The tax is so high, I pay almost half of my salary to the greedy state". No, you certainly don't! And if everyone please spent 5 minutes to understand the difference between the effective tax rate and the marginal tax rate, we'd finally get rid of that pointless discussion.
With a 100k salary, there is ~75k net arriving at you bank account, if you're married. If you take care of children, it's even more.
I live in Norway and pay an 34% effective tax. The highest in the world at my salary level. I don't complain, because tax money is used for an excellent education system, including the best libraries I've ever been to, and not least for my own ~50k€ PhD salary that every single PhD student in town receives. Meanwhile my high school in Germany didn't even have soap dispensers in the bathrooms because highly skilled hacker news readers don't bother to learn the basics of their tax system before they go and vote for corrupt privatization parties that promise lower taxes and cut back public investments.
> "Money that your employer could otherwise add to your payout..."
Also, please don't mix up taxes, insurance and pension. If you'd prefer to pay for medical expenses yourself, do the math. You don't want that, especially when you have a family.
This is also one of my pet peeves. I keep thinking “people do understand progressive taxation, right?”, but in discussions like this, I realize: no, maybe they don’t. If you’re a single filer who makes $180K in the US in 2022, you’re in the 32% tax bracket. But your effective federal tax rate is just over 21% — and that’s assuming you’re only taking the standard deduction.
Are you sure that they're mistaking marginal tax rates for effective tax rates, rather than you mistaking gripes about taxes in general for gripes about federal income tax in particular? In my state, a single filer making $180k pays 34.6% effective tax on income - 19.1% federal income, 6.4% FICA, and 9.2% state income tax. (And maybe 4% more from property taxes if they own a house in a major city, although that's a somewhat different subject.)
This is not to say that rich people are actually poor because of taxes, obviously, but it seems more likely that people would talk about these things in a somewhat inaccurate way than that they would be totally wrong about what they actually pay.
On the contrary, the OP has got it right (perhaps accidentally), and you're the one confusing things.
You're correct that taxes, insurance, and pensions are different things, but in the context of "what amount of money arrives in your bank account at the end of the month", I find it a distinction without a difference.
Plugging in a 100k brutto salary into https://www.bbx.de/brutto-netto-rechner/, yields 57k of take home pay for the year, which is within spitting distance of the 58k figure quoted by OP.
The _income taxes_ of it add to up to "only" ~29k, sure.
And your example of getting 75k on 100k of income if you're married only applies if your spouse doesn't work; which; while I'm sure is a commonly occurring situation, it feels disingenuous to not specify that when mentioning it.
Don't get me wrong — having immigrated from Poland, I am having exactly the same feelings you do towards paying high taxes in Norway — I'm more than happy to pay those, and I see a _world_ of difference in how that that money is used; but we can make _those_ arguments without downplaying the actual amount of money that goes to the State.
I explicitly said “tax (including insurances)” to make it clear that for a simple calculations of the money that doesn’t reach your bank account. Now in Germany the percentage of income that goes to health insurance is dictated by government, currently around 15%. While insurance is not tax, i’d dictated by government how much to pay, makes no big difference to a tax either.
This is wrong, getting ~58k in your bank account from a 100k salary for a single is certainly what you can expect.
The 75k you mention will only happen if your spouse doesn't work at all, a rather disingenuous framing.
If you're happy paying high taxes, you shouldn't feel the need to hide the real numbers (even if you're hiding by omission).
Europe is a very different system. Suppose I work freelance in New York City, so I make $20,000 a month.
$8,000 -- city, state, and federal taxes take 40%
$3,500 -- rent
$1,500 -- health insurance
$4,000 -- care for my elderly mom
total: $17,000
In other words, it is easy to make $20,000 a month in New York City and feel like you are barely surviving. I'm grateful I don't have children, as it allows me to take care of my mom. If I did have kids, then some very painful choices would have to be made about care for my mom.
Most of Europe sees you with the same tax rates of roughly 40%, if not higher. Even after rent, tax, and health insurance, your leftover pay is more than a mid to senior engineer will _gross_ before tax and rent in most major European cities. The real outlier there is the care cost. if you didn't have that, you would have 7/month left over (and even after that, you have $36k/year) - that's more than a mid level engineer will gross in the UK.
Despite a generally higher cost of living in Europe, salaries across the board are lower. A £100k salary in the UK puts you in the 96th percentile for example. It's not just engineers, it's everyone.
This is probably a controversial thing to say, but based on your and other comments in this thread, it seems like the social safety nets aren't worth the lower salaries. Or are they? It seems like non-Americans in this thread are unhappy that their ceilings are lower.
The Welfare State is meant to be a stabilizing force to avoid social unrest and to guarantee that the elites can enjoy their power/status but at least not destroy the fabric of society completely. The Welfare State is not meant to be "worth it". You can not think of it as something that has a ROI, because it is not an investment. It is insurance.
With that said: my net salary may be less than half of my American counterpart, but my quality of life is certainly better here. At the moment, I would be more interested in getting "German" salaries but to be able to live in Southern Europe than to get US-salaries in Germany.
But it's precisely the welfare state that brought my former country to the brink, when a massive influx of refugees put so much strain on public services, that lifelong citizens were having to wait months for critical care and stirring up (understandable) angry, nationalist sentiment. And there are many such examples across Europe at different times.
The other thing the safety net doesn't seem to provide is happiness, much to the chagrin of American democratic socialists. Overtime, unchecked depression results in the crumbling of society as well.
> The Welfare State is meant to be a stabilizing force to avoid social unrest and to guarantee that the elites can enjoy their power/status
Those are your beliefs, not facts.
The Welfare State exists because some politicians genuinely care about people and want to help those who fall ill or have a divorce and no where to live or lose their job etc.
Not all politicians are calculating sociopaths.
> You can not think of it as something that has a ROI,
Say that to the people in the US dying from cancer because they cannot afford the expensive treatments. Or a researcher 70+ years old, but who cannot retire (although he's 70+), because then he couldn't afford his medications.
Or youths without money to study at University.
Quite odd beliefs and ideas you've ended up with, from my perspective.
Do you think they should be forced to stay? Suppose it was easy for all of those high performers (who wanted to leave) to move to the USA. You would lose out on that extra tax revenue, and it would undermine the redistribution scheme.
Thats a big stretch and a huge thought experiment, and way out of scope of what we're talking about (but no I don't). Any sort of systemic change on that scale would make me reevaluate where I live though - if for example I lived on a country that flip flopped between right wing and centrist every four years I would be pretty uncomfortable with that.
> Suppose it was easy for all of those high performers
A bit of a nitpick, but an important one. High performers and high earners are not the same thing.
No there was not a huge capital flight. This have been aborted solely because of threats from the ultra richs in France.
Moreover, this law was actually pretty fair : it was applied on marginal annual revenue over 1M so it meant that you had to be actually a multi-millionaire to be concerned.
No, France didn't threaten to force high earners to leave, they tried to enforce a higher tax on the absolute absolute highest earners in the country. Even making 3-400k you would have been unlikely to have been affected by this. Funnily enough, you'll also notice the bluster was about people leaving to other EU states and not to the US.
Also, to call the French government socialist I'd completely laughable. Maybe in comparison to somewhere like Hungary, sure.
I am not talking about Macron, I am talking about Hollande, which is (was?) the leader of the Socialist Party.
And I may be wrong about it, but I think that he increased taxes all across high-income brackets, not just the absolute top. And that certainly leads to a game-theoretical equilibrium.
To me (and I assume others) the following calculation comes into play:
- for what I pay in taxes, do I get a reasonably good public services back? I am not saying that I want to account for every euro, but I don't want to feel like I did in Brazil, paying 38% effective tax rate and receiving virtually nothing back in public services and still having to pay again for private healthcare, private education for the kids, etc...
- how much money do I have left in the bank after I paid all my expenses and taxes, i.e, what is my saving power?
If I had a 250k€/year brutto income, it wouldn't be too difficult to show that I would be better off in Switzerland (higher CoL, but way lower tax rate) or in Greece (similar tax rates, less return on public services, but way lower CoL). If Germany decided to increase the effective tax rate, this threshold would go down significantly.
>Despite a generally higher cost of living in Europe, salaries across the board are lower.
I was more responding to that idea: everything is more expensive, and everyone is making a lot less (not just the top quintile). Seems like a bad trade, but that's just my $0.02
Except everything isn't more expensive. For example rent. Also, everyone can go see a doctor and pay nothing (not just the top quintile). All of this is if course simplified, but just to add another pair of cents.
And groceries. I was _shocked_ at how expensive buying fresh food was in the US, and funnily enough, the most desired food was imported from the EU and was far more expensive. Here's a great comparison - aged parmesan cheese from the supermarket [0] [1] is $11/lb here, or $17+tax in the US. This is the same for a huge amount of ingredients too; cheeses, meats + veg. I helped a friend do his grocery shopping in a trader joes, by my best guess it was twice the price of my shop in Sainsbury's (a middle-of-the-road supermarket)
> aged parmesan cheese from the supermarket [0] [1] is $11/lb here, or $17+tax in the US.
No shit, it’s literally an import from Europe. It’s like comparing California wine prices in Las Vegas vs in Sydney.
> veg. I helped a friend do his grocery shopping in a trader joes
Trader Joe’s is not a grocery store for middle class people. It’s a high end convenience store. Unless you’re really well-off, you only buy a few select items from there occasionally.
If you want to see prices the working/middle class pays, look at the prices at Walmart.
No. Imported wine is quite often cheaper than domestic ones in the US.
Also, you want to compare the quality of products and you can not base yourself on Walmart for that. The average American eats horribly compared to the European counterpart.
> Imported wine is quite often cheaper than domestic ones in the US.
Not anything of quality. Most good wines in California that aren’t nasty blends are California wines at $10/bottle range.
> want to compare the quality of products and you can not base yourself on Walmart for that.
Yes you can. The milks, meats, vegetables, and fruits are fine quality-wise. “Walmart == bad quality” is a meme based on their cheap home goods. The food is fine.
> The average American eats horribly compared to the European counterpart.
Having lives in both places (uk, France, and Italy), the supermarkets in the US are vastly superior. The only reason an American would eat worse is if they chose frozen meals, snacks, or just straight up fast food over what’s in the grocery store.
European food costs more and is of more limited variety. The quality is consistently decent though.
Given we're talking about why salaries are higher in the US, i think it's fair to point out the comparison of items that are possible to buy in a normal supermarket here. I searched for parmesan in Walmart and could only buy an entire wheel for ~$26/lb.
The people who I'm comparing myself to in the US strive to buy imported European food, so that's the comparison I'm going to end up making.
Even basic things like fresh vegetables and fresh meat far more expensive than they are in supermarkets here.
I'm an engineer living in the UK who likely _could_ move to the US and take a larger salary, but actively choose not to pursue that option. As I've said many times on this site, it's likely that after paying rent for an apartment in SF, health insurance, and all my living costs, my pay after that would be more than the gross pay of an engineer in most parts of the UK, I still decide not to move for a few reasons.
The first question I ask is what would I do with the extra money. I don't _want_ to retire at 40 to pursue my dreams, I like what I'm doing and the pace that I'm doing it at. If I had the choice, I would choose to be where I am doing what I am doing. Why would I move somewhere else for 10 years to make money only to come back and do what I'm doing right now? [0]. I have friends, family, a life here. I don't want to uproot all of that (I have no kids and have already moved country, I don't want to do it again unless it would improve my quality of life). My partner would likely need to find something to do, as it's unlikely she would find a company willing to sponsor a visa for her line of work. Health care being tied to my place of employment is a total nightmare - I can only imagine what happens if I'm in a car accident and I end up at the wrong hospital, or treated by an anaesthetist that is out of network. It's also not just me, the injustice of it boils my blood, and I don't really want to contribute to that system.
I own a car, but it spends 5 days a week parked outside my door, and is only used for "adventuring". The idea of movin somewhere to live in a large house that I have to drive for groceries, drive to the doctors, drive to the bar after work etc, is not appealing to me.
The annual leave situation is commonly far superior in Europe - my current job has 40 days PTO per year, and I take them all. My previous job, the American employees had unlimited PTO, and I don't think my boss ever took anything longer than a long weekend in the 3 years I worked there. It also seemed many of them were banking on a "European trip of a lifetime" with their families, which I can do on the train from where I live (also I live in one of those bucket list countries to boot).
> It seems like non-Americans in this thread are unhappy that their ceilings are lower.
Grass is always greener. The Americans in this thread are complaining that it's so much more expensive to live in the US and are unhappy that it costs so much. Of course it seems the "ideal" situation is work for an American company, on an American salary and live in the UK, but having worked with Americans for the last decade, that has it's tradeoffs too - my workday starts at 10am and ends at 7pm (whereas my partner works 9-5). The "culture" of American work spills across, etc.
I live in a country with 5 million people. Any software targeting the local market automatically has much less potential for growth than in the US with its 330 mln, so the work of making it has comparably less economic value. I'd say that's at least part of the explanation.
If this a realistic representation of your situation, I have a tiny piece of unsolicited advice: open a retirement account like a SEP IRA. You can contribute up to 25% of your salary in there, and avoid those steep NY/NYC taxes. That can save you a truckload of money.
And I know NYC rent is steep. I lived there as of 6 months ago, and spent a hell of a lot less on rent, and had an apartment no reasonable person would describe as "barely survivable"—it was a beautiful place in Downtown Brooklyn. Rents have increased a bit, as they have everywhere, this past year. But $3,500/month is.. more than ~1/3 of NYC residents take home a month total.
I am pretty sure they're saying $200k before taxes. It's equivalent wage in Germany would be 150k€, as the employer has to pay about 21% on top of the salary for social securities.
I agree that these numbers always sound outlandish (I'm from Germany too), but they do seem to be true. Do keep in mind that while the wage gap is bad here, its several times worse in the USA.
I know it is pre-tax. I also know that there are benefits in Europe that simply do not exist in the US - minimum of 25 days of actual vacation and not that "you may travel for a few days, but you are still on-call" thing that people in the US call "holidays", Elternzeit, etc...
But still, no one would claim that is easy to get a 90k€ salary in Germany, or that "if you are not asking that much then what are you doing". For 150, you have to be way above average or you have to running your own business.
You have more then 25 days of "real" vacation at all the major tech companies in the USA. Pretty much all the issues that people mention in the USA (healthcare, vacation, maternity leave, etc) are non issues for employees in our industry.
The only true risk is becoming unemployable for some reason and losing your job. USA tech might fly higher but can crater way lower.
My teammate took 6 months off paid for her maternity leave but in general I can't really say. It's not a benefit I've looked much into; I'm male and don't plan on having kids this decade.
No 200K doesn't include say things like 401K contribution or health contribution from employer's side. So if you are going to top German salary with employer contribution, you need to do the same with USA salary.
yeah as another tech worker in Berlin, reading these salaries on consistent basis is kinda depressing. The 70-80K is like a starting tech salaries in larger part of US. Here in Berlin you have to toll for multiple years and then before you know you have hit the 90-100K ceiling.
Just compare Berlin with any big American US city, Berliner's PPP is still quite low. This is after the salary "boom" in Berlin.
COVID and companies being more open to hire remotely has partially fixed that, I know of multiple people making 130kE+ in Berlin now, working remotely, with full benefits of being an employee of a German GmbH.
Depends if you count the cost of statutory health insurance as a de-facto tax, in which case it's closer to 40% again. There's a bit more nuance to this (there's a contribution cap), but if you ever read that taxes in Germany are lower than 40% odds are the speaker is leaving out health insurance.
Aside: The neat thing with the statutory health insurance is of course that they have to pay for your treatment, no matter how fucked up your situation is or how little money you have - but if you're healthy and well-paid it's poor value.
Parent was talking about 42% tax rate, so taxes only. Yes you get deducted more for social services, health insurance, pensions and unemployment insurance push this up to 46% going to the government services when you earn 100k.
Doesn't matter. There's plenty of remote (as in worldwide) offers with these figures now.
Source: heavily interviewed last July while living in Moscow, Russia. Got several offers in that ballpark, accepted one from "Who's hiring" HN thread. Not a rockstar, just a regular developer.
But unless your story can come with many other examples, it should not be counted as representative of any "average" situation from the market at large.
The mental health aspect I think is often overlooked. When young engineers are eager to climb the ladder into senior/principal/distinguished positions (this was me, btw) they often overlook what it does to your mental health. The beginning seems great. Big problems, big solutions, everyone knows what’s their role in it and how to get it done. Over the years that view will fade. The certainty of success replaced by tooling up, research, supporting articles, still engineering hard stuff, fielding workshops by the business to help educate and rehash the vision to this next set of recent college grads. The complexity of the job increases as the responsibility increases.
My brother is also an engineer and instead of going after titles and management he decided to stay as an engineer for as long as he could. He’s extremely happy working on things without having direct reports. There’s a sweet spot for everyone here. Some like more freedom and time to recharge (this is me) and some can balance the demands of the work with the demands to explore work (my brother). Then there are others who dive so far head first into work they burn themselves out.
Please, take the time to find your balance. Not only will you be happier, people around you will be too.
I tried to re-negotiate a 4 day work week, but they weren't having it, so ended up walking. I know it is privileged to say, but sometimes no amount of money is worth giving up things that are important to you. For me, I was giving up my time and ignoring a project that I think is very important. When I came to my senses about how the money isn't worth giving that up, they had to yield, or I had to leave.
How would one go about finding such consulting gigs?
I’m semi-retired now, but with nearly 4 decades of experience, I still didn’t feel comfortable becoming a full-time consultant.
Yeah to echo what was said, I would start shaking that network tree you built while working for 4 decades. I would also put yourself out there on sites like LinkedIn (I know, I know) that have groups for people looking to hire consultants or are ones themselves. There’s an online niche for everything these days.
Tech salaries are a direct result of basic supply/demand. The available supply of workers and the demand for a job are, to a certain extent, independent from how "vital and stressful" the job is.
The only bubble that might pop is an America first hiring mindset which constricts the supply. If this were to change I would expect tech salaries in America to go lower. Then again, this is not that hard to do, most large tech companies already have major offshore dev teams. There are clearly reasons why companies don't move more of their spend offshore.
> Maybe the problem is that those other guys as vital and stressful are not being paid enough?
One possible reason for this is that in software the "means of production" is much more accessible, so it's easier for a group of developerss to go it alone than it is in many other professions. When tech salaries are compared to "small business owners" in general, it doesn't seem so out of whack.
I'm not going to say people don't also have stressful and difficult jobs while making less. But I will say that I was paid what I was paid because the employer and I negotiated, and determined that my salary was mutually financially beneficial.
Not sure why people say this. In the US, you can get a 200k USD job without any RSUs/bonuses/options, all in base salary, and these jobs won't be over 40 hours a week. I see it among my friends daily. And in FAANG, it's even higher, I've seen offers for people only with a few years of experience at 350k or more (RSU appreciation mainly, not base salary).
It's more that people don't really believe the high salaries and think that there must be some catch. In reality, there isn't, it's just that software is eating the world and thus companies must pay for talent.
Google L5 in the Bay Area doesn’t pay $200k base. Your friends are either lying to you or you are an exceptional group not representative of standard senior Bay Area FAANG base salaries.
I never said FAANG pays 200k base. Companies who only pay in cash will have their total compensation be 200k. FAANG meanwhile pays a lower base, such as 170k, and the rest is RSUs. While FAANG base is lower, their total compensation is higher than other companies.
I think of it like this: They can't pay me enough to take a $200k job. By which I mean that for most $200k jobs, the money would not be enough to justify the trade off. But everyone makes their own choices on that sort of thing.
This is pretty universal to all industries. You just don’t get paid well for the work you do in X hours. You get paid well became you’re expected to put in a high amount of effort that isn’t measured in time or stress, except by you.
Also, speaking personally as someone doing £180k when I know my market salary is at most two thirds of that: I don't really spend the money, because I never want to be pinioned to my job, or to even feel like I'm locked into my job because I'd e.g. have to move out of my house if I quit. That limits you quite a bit, unless you're preternaturally confident in your jobseeking ability.
I do the same. I’m naturally frugal but have loosened up some as earnings increases but I don’t spend or leverage like my peers. They are prisoners to their jobs and I can (and have) said “enough” and walked away when jobs get too toxic. I don’t generally have a problem working long hard hours but I unplug at times where interruptions will not be fielded and I’ve been present during complete shit show management stuff that I just morally will not be associated with. It’s immensely helpful to my mental health knowing I can walk off anytime things go sideways.
I even negotiate my compensation in a manner that I’m not beholden like those with stock, options or anything where vesting periods are involved. It’s typically event based and more short term. But, I don’t work in a field where I’m turning down early Facebook equity or something like that.
Yeah, that sounds very similar to me. I’m the opposite in terms of spending - I’ll naturally default to spending my income, rather than defaulting to not spending – but that only holds up to about £100k, at which point it goes beyond my capacity to (in a natural way) spend it all. But I share the concern about being a prisoner to one’s job. That’s my main concern. I don’t understand how so many people are willing to put themselves in a position - partly in terms of spending habits but primarily in terms of fixed commitments like rent and women - where they could not live their current life without their job, where losing or forgoing it would mean ruination, by the standards of the life they choose for themselves. That’s just beyond my comprehension. For me a job is a very contingent thing.
I grew up in the US, my parents are very blue collar, neither of them went to college, and they worked hard to give me and my sibling a decent childhood. I went to the cheapest college I could (a local university you've never heard of) to get a BS in Computer Science.
I worked my ass off, grinding on interview studying, working internships and jumping companies whenever I could get a better offer. I'm about to turn 30 and I made 430k (200k of which is salary) in 2021 working at a big company in the US.
I would not consider my background to be particularly privileged and I don't consider myself to be all that smart, but I managed to get here just by working hard and never getting comfortable. Yes, if you get comfortable in the first tech job you land and just sit around enjoying your life, then you probably won't naturally end up in a place making lots of money.
Obviously being privileged and getting everything handed to you makes landing a nice cushy job much easier, but there are still plenty of paths to these high paying jobs if you're willing to work hard.
Also, as mentioned by another person in this thread, this totally does take a toll on your mental health and you absolutely have to sacrifice things. I gave up a lot of things that would have given me a better quality of life, but those were choices I was willing to make.
also most cs people who are smart tend to think they are average because they are surrounded by other very smart people. I hate that mindset of "oh if you work hard, you too can get a FAANG job making 400k"
I think I'm below average, and then I interview CS grads and "7 years experience in X" on the resume who struggle to write a for-loop, or even write a single line of code at all... I feel like I'm constantly being gaslit.
It really depends where in the USA. This Harvard project tracks intergenerational mobility. I make more annually than both my parents made combined for their three peak years. https://opportunityinsights.org/ I come from one of the highly mobile counties.
The privilege I am talking about is related to the chances of access to $200k jobs.
Just being born and raised in the US means that you don't have to worry about visa issues, for example. And when I was in the US, I only managed to get my H1B through a quota-exempt employer, meaning I couldn't move around for better offers. I also lost count of how many times I received the "you have very good qualifications but unfortunately we can not sponsor visas" email.
I don't think the privilege is just about being handled things easily, it's also about being able to reach such positions, no matter what the upbringing you had.
A lot of people are going to work as hard or harder than you, but because they chose a different career or because they don't have your set of skills, they'll never reach what you got and that is a huge privilege.
> I don't think the privilege is just about being handled things easily
It seems like there are many cases like this where people have different perspectives because they have different understandings of certain word. E.g. "privilege": to some this doesn't have any implications around fairness, like "you pass the exam and you can get your driver's license; then you have the privilege to drive." To others "you're privileged" has an implicit "which isn't fair, and shouldn't be so* attached.
Oh yes, you are totally right, and I'm not saying I don't have any privileges because I obviously was given a ton of them. You're right, I wasn't born a poor farmer's child in Africa or something, I'm speaking relatively.
If we're just talking about people who already know they want to work in tech and have some access to a technical education, then I think a path to these jobs is absolutely open to pretty much everyone if they are willing to work hard and sacrifice things. Of course it is easier for some people than others, it's not fair.
> Yes you can make that, but only if you are in a tiny (and normally very privileged) set
If we're talking about people talented enough to actually build and ship their own apps independently, a $200K or more compensation package should be easy to come by remotely or in any medium size city.
For the truly average developer, $200K is definitely not the norm according to any compensation data I've seen.
I've built and shipped my own apps independently. I have almost 20 years of professional experience in Web, some Machine Learning and Data Science. I also led teams distributed around the world. I also got into blockchain development in 2019 and now I am working on a slow-but-steadily-growing open source project [0] to make payments with crypto easier. I'm living in the hot "tech center of Europe" (Berlin) and I'm yet to see (much less receive) any offer above 90k€/year.
Let's make a deal: I will give you my CV and we can work through it to see what I need to improve. If you get me an $200k/year offer that lets me work remotely, I will give you 15% of it for as long as I work there.
> I'm living in the hot "tech center of Europe" (Berlin) and I'm yet to see (much less receive) any offer above 90k€/year.
European compensation is lower. Sorry, I shouldn't be generalizing to United States like I did.
That said, in Berlin your options for high comp are largely limited to the big tech companies. You can get some hints here: https://techpays.eu/europe/germany# (sort by total compensation).
My suggestion, if you really want to get those high value offers, is to identify the best paying names on that list and start applying now. Stripe, Shopify, Twitter, other big tech US remote companies primarily. Work with their recruiters to optimize your CV and update your study skills. Use the interviews as practice and feedback, because it will be better than just about any advice we can give you online.
Whatever you do, don't pay some rando from HN huge amounts of money for help. All of the information about interviewing at big tech companies is out there for free. Plenty of prep material to study from.
I said that I would pay conditionally on getting the job, not for the help. ;)
And it was on purpose. I know that HN is US-centric, but I lived on both sides of the ocean and as time passes I am getting more sensitive to this limited (dare I say privileged?) view from otherwise very smart and educated people.
My proposal was more of a provocation to see if you could really back up the statement that "it should be easy for good people to make that much money remotely or medium-sized city".
> information about interviewing at big tech companies
That's the other thing that bugs me a lot: Big Tech. If these salaries are only attainable at FAANG companies, then the road of getting 200k+ offers is no longer just about being "above average", but also to be okay in selling your soul by working in places that long stopped worrying about the welfare of its consumers.
> If these salaries are only attainable at FAANG companies
They are not. Looking at LinkedIn I see many such salaries for engineers. At your experience level you would be making many hundreds of thousands of dollars in the US, even remotely.
- it can not be a FAANG company, or any other company who makes their money by unethically exploiting consumerism, and/or advertising that abuses user privacy. These are non-negotiables. I want to sleep at night without thinking about how many people get screwed over for my benefit.
- things like "flexible schedule" and "work-life balance" need to be more than just wishful thinking. I have two small kids that are always going to be my priority.
If you are up for it, let me know your email and I will send you my CV.
> Also the cost of doing something so small can add up when you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy.
The point being relatively easy if you fit a specific criteria (don't need flexibility, want to work long hours, have a above average CV, can live near a major tech hub, have no problem working for FAANG etc).
My proposal was a direct response to PragmaticPulp, who said "a $200K or more compensation package should be easy to come by remotely or in any medium size city."
And this is why I made the proposal, it was a challenge to this notion that it is easy. I stand by the idea that is not, and I am willing to pay to be proven wrong.
Why? I'm reading over the proposal I made and I can not find anything bad about it.
Worst case, they can't find a job and nothing changes. Best case, I'd be getting a job where I could work from anywhere in the world and that would pay me 30% more than what I was getting previously.
> If we're talking about people talented enough to actually build and ship their own apps independently, a $200K or more compensation package should be easy to come by remotely or in any medium size city.
I've been able to build and ship my own apps for almost a decade now and have never received an offer close to that, even in SF. Maybe things have changed in the last 5 years, but whenever I see the 200k figure I always have to scoff.
Sounds like the missing piece is the interviewing and negotiation skills. The money is there, you just have to convince them that it is in their best interests to give it to you.
Ah yes, the lady at Uber who was being paid 250k who used Edit>Copy/Paste to paste lines of Python from Notepad into a REPL and got confused with extraneous whitespace errors in order to prove to me that some python doesn't work (even though it did) with a position of "Staff Engineer 1" certainly deserved it more than almost literally everyone else I've worked with.
Please take a look at levels.fyi if you don't believe there are $200K offers available (caveat: I can only speak for US+Canada).
I'm an above-average-skill but ADHD / below-average-work-ethic software dev in Canada who just finished interviews and my highest offer was $150K USD. I only prepped algorithms for 1-2 months but have a feeling if I spent 4 months prepping, I'd be able to break into the mid to high 200K USD range. And this is well below what a lot of people are making in the U.S. according to levels.fyi and teamblind.com
I don't say this to make you feel bad, and I even agree that the average is of course lower (glassdoor says the U.S. average for software engineers is ~$108K USD though I suspect older data-points bring it down from the real figure).
But I think >70% of U.S.-based software engineers with >5 years of experience are capable of breaking into 200K USD if they spent 3-6 months preparing (depending on their degree of natural talent and abilities to learn, problem-solve, and retain information).
Of course, chasing TC is also not a fun treadmill to be on, so if you're comfortable, you should do what makes you happy :)
The point of this is to say that these numbers are very, very real, and even attainable for the majority of devs who set their sights on them, and it's kind of silly to scoff at them as you put it. The only important skills required are ambition, dedication, perseverance, and good research skills (which are among the most critical skills for software engineers anyway) to be able to navigate negotiations and the market.
The software engineer hiring market is very trimodal:
There are companies that hire at average salaries. Usually targeting Radford database @ 50% or whatever numbers they think they can get away with paying.
The next cluster of companies pay well but not at FAANG levels. They pay somewhere around 80-90th percentile of salary data. They collect all of the best employees who either can't, won't, or don't want to get FAANG jobs.
Then the long tail of FAANG salaries occupies something like the 95th-99th percentile of salaries. These are the numbers you see on the levels.fyi homepage.
HN tends to over-emphasize the FAANG level salaries, but there are a lot of companies in the middle bucket that pay much better than average. You might have to network and work to find them, though. Staying at average or below-average companies too long can actually make your resume less attractive over time, so you have to put in some work to break out of the rut and into the higher paying companies.
It's not that simple. Even if you are a great developer, but not from first-world country, you can forget about 200k unless you literally bust your ass for years and years in order to get US visa.
A lot of people on Hacker News are in the USA, so we see a lot of USA salaries posted here. Obviously you'll make a bit less in Europe, that is a different system, salaries are lower but social services are higher. And outside of the West, I think we all understand that salaries are lower. We could adopt the habit of stating which country we are in, with every comment that we post. Would that help?
I hear you. I meant in the context of people who can get that 200K job instead of indie hacking. I don't know the founder of "actual" personally but I just checked his twitter profile and he works in design systems at Stripe. I would guess he is not too far off from that number (all in).
$200k is increasingly a mid-career engineering salary in many parts of the US. Some quick examples taken from companies reported on levels.fyi, where pay around $200k was reported for people working outside the most expensive US cities plus Austin:
TL;DR; look around and ask for more if you don't see $200k near you and you would like to earn more. I'm biased, but I think it's also worth noting that $200k in Dallas leaves a person with a lot more money left over after basic expenses than it does in SF.
As a technical lead (one level above senior software developer in my current company), I make €96k in Germany. I had an interview with Klarna, and they offered me €85k (they actually started with 75 and went up to 85), and the interviewer nearly laughed at me when I asked for €110k.
https://techpays.com looks really interesting for European compensation transparency. Tech folks should get paid a lot more, especially those outside the US.
That ExxonMobile link has 3 of 20 salaries being an amount above $122k and only 1 at $200k. So, even in your cherry-picked examples one of the companies only has a single person making this "mid-career salary".
0 - These examples were chosen specifically to avoid software & Internet companies, to show that "real" companies that operate in "normal" parts of the country also pay in the $200k range. (These companies are also likely to have less representation on levels.fyi because people who spend any time on levels quickly start wondering why they aren't working for a tech company.) "Cherry-picking" would be highlighting all the FAAMNG workers who are remote and/or working in satellite offices. Google engineers in midtown Atlanta are paid well above any of these, but I specifically did not include those jobs because those in fact are elite.
1 - levels.fyi will not have a record of all the folks working at a given company.
2 - Somebody is indeed the highest-paid engineer at every firm, so that data point is relevant. (It could be you!)
5 - Yes, some tech people make a lot less than others. It is also true that $200k is still rapidly becoming a mid-career salary in major US cities beyond the expensive coasts. (No, you are not mid-career at age 28.)
Mid-career means somewhere near the middle of your career. If you expect to work from age ~23 to ~65, the middle is around age 44. (Edit: if you start work at age 18, the middle is still over age 41.) Age 28 is much closer to the beginning of your career than the middle. Even if you retire at 50, the middle of your career is still in your mid-30s.
I am inclined to agree with you, but tech has two peculiar distinctions:
First, tech changes so fast that we end up having many "mini-careers" instead of a long one.
Second, ageism is still a thing: unless your work is so noteworthy that companies hire you for the PR (or to avoid that a competitor hires you for similar reasons), companies think there is not that much of a difference between someone with 5-7 years of experience vs 12-15.
> First, tech changes so fast that we end up having many "mini-careers" instead of a long one.
This is where senior engineers have an opportunity to shine. Knowing not to pick up every shiny object, being able to draw parallels between many different projects, etc. all matter. For shipping software, just as it's possible to draw on lessons across tech stacks, it's also possible to apply lessons from entirely different paradigms (e.g. Windows desktop vs Web vs mobile).
The risk here is the apocryphal interview question of whether an engineer has 15 times of 1 year of experience or 15 years of experience. Mini-careers are better.
> Second, ageism is still a thing: unless your work is so noteworthy that companies hire you for the PR (or to avoid that a competitor hires you for similar reasons), companies think there is not that much of a difference between someone with 5-7 years of experience vs 12-15.
Ageism is definitely a thing. However, I can attest that companies can understand the difference if you are able to communicate it effectively. Again, remember that in the scheme of things that a person with 5-7 years of experience is new to the field. If you have 15 years of meaningful experience, you should be able to differentiate from someone who does not, in a way that matters to the hiring firm.
The bigger hurdle in mid-career is that where a firm may be frequently hiring juniors due to higher turnover and the general need by many teams to have fewer experienced engineers than juniors, they may not hire senior folks as frequently. So the job search to find an real senior role will take longer. This is not unique to tech; the dynamics are broadly similar to other professional fields.
The bottom line is that $200k at non-tech firms in major US cities is by no means a comp range for a mid-career engineer that requires one to be especially noteworthy in the field.
The keyword I'm assuming is "relatively," I'm hoping it's not absolutely an easy job because that would just be wasted money, which I don't put as being above some people's intelligence but still.
The point is that it's much easier and more lucrative to use your expertise as a well-paid employee than to run your own small business. Been on either side, can confirm.
I come from a very poor part of the world, and know people worse off than me be able to reach this position via hard work. So, in my personal opinion, I'm inclined to believe GP in this instance.
Well, it's the type of business. Personal finance is super-hard to break into. It requires trust and budget. Trust requires users and word of mouth so its chicken and egg. you're not going to compete as a one man show with intuit on budgets or trust.
i get the vision - build something so good and usable, and they will come. The good thing about Quickbooks though is that it's trustworthy in the social proof sense. That trumps a lot of ease of use (though it is also easy to use)
> Also the cost of doing something so small can add up when you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy.
You've hit it on the head. The fastest way to wealth is not a startup (though VCs want everyone to look the other way that most fail), but to get a job at a FAANG or FAANG adjacent company.
A friend just switched jobs and he made a hit list of companies based on his analysis of expected RSU appreciation.
legend admits their flaws, opened up and used the flaw and fuckup to educate people, plus gave the public domain perpetually until it no longer exists an invaluable tool to learn about your own financial habits and imagine some parent with too many problems and this becomes the thing they can use to build themselves up again.
i agree with you, but sometimes as a human, the only way to actually learn something is to go through it. and who knows how many people this "fuckup" ends helping.
compare this owner to most governments. dude could have changed his name and gotten a pegleg and parrot and sailed to the Caribbean and never said anything or blamed it on the mole people. but no, legends dont blame shit on the mole people.
Building your own business is as much about business plans as it is to building the product as it is making sure there's enough toilet paper in the bathroom. And all of those are important
The blog talks about additional feature development. If you have 810 paid subscribers and you're focusing on feature development instead of growth, you're either still, somehow, trying to find product-market fit (in spite of 810 customers) or you simply enjoy feature development more than business development.
The blog is all about him discovering that he doesn't really enjoy business development.
Based on the post, he was on his 4th year, and his current number of monthly paid subscriber was 810 for 4$ a month (thus less than 40k$ a year)...
I got a feeling that he just didn't see an opening toward making this viable against YNAB. An important fact is that YNAB increased their pricing recently, which caused quite a bit of stir up and an exodus to competitors. Everything was in his favor, cheaper than YNAB, people were freely advertising his app. As he mentioned he started to try to implement Plaid, I guess he did the math and found out that he would get too close to YNAB price (for sure it's going to be a few dollars a month)...
Great to see it going open source! I hope Actual can keep development going with the community support.
Similarly, a local-first (PouchDB) budgeting app I built[1] went open source[2][3] a few years ago. It's worked out well, I love seeing what everyone does with it in their forks. Unlike Actual however, I maintain a paid subscription service while being open source.
It's worked out quite well. Luckily it's not a huge time commitment as a side project, probably due to no native apps. I've also shifted from active development to maintenance, with sporadic updates every now and then. For example, I recently moved everything from Gitlab to Github[4] and upgraded a bunch of dependencies under the hood to get everything compiling on Apple Silicon. (For example, I now run AngularJS tests with Jest, hehe.)
What's shutting down is the public syncing server. That server is literally just a message store: it takes CRDT changes and puts them in a big table. And it servers them back out.
Now that the server is public, it's incredibly easy for you to run your own. It's such a simple server (no postgres etc requirement) that this model is actually way better.
CRDT's and the like seem like the perfect thing to build an app, but you make a good point about it requiring something so custom compared to a thin client that makes web service requests for data on each screen / page view.
> you make a good point about it requiring something so custom
The comment you're replying to didn't say this at all, the developer did. In theory it's also wrong. The server can be application agnostic. It shouldn't care whether the CRDT update is from a budget app or an RSS reader or whatever else, because the sync job for the server is exactly the same. You should also be able to encrypt the content, and therefore set up generic shared CRDT servers instead of requiring people to run their own.
It only requires more work now because nobody has built that yet.
There are a lot of tools like Actual (YNAB, Monarch, Mint, Aspire google sheet etc). All are focused on budgets and mostly managing cash accounts.
I've always wanted an equivalent but for investments. I know you can sync investment accounts to some of these, but that only reports the balance generally.
I'd love to have the equivalent for investment accounts that answer these questions:
What is my sector exposure?
How much, across multiple accounts and brokerages, of Apple (or any stock/etf/mutual fund) do I own as a total percentage?
How much money are in retirement accounts vs non retirement accounts?
What is my IRR (rate of return) in aggregate and per account?
And of course things like projections, safe withdrawal rates, analysis in the form of charts and graphs like what Actual and the rest offer.
If you're interested in exploring full-time work around this, I'm on the Monarch team, and would love to chat. Most of us our personal finance geeks on some level and we've loved working on this together. Our investment sync is pretty primitive right now but we have a pretty big batch of work in the next few months around planning/goals/advice (which would include investments, debt paydown, etc).
You can find me on LinkedIn through my About link (or just apply on the website, we keep a close eye on applicants especially if they're interested in personal finance).
Maybe is roughly working on this for all of your assets.
Not much on their website yet but there's a high-level roadmap, discord, and newsletter. They're in testing with beta customers atm. Josh also built Baremetrics which does a great job of slicing and rearranging business data streams into useful insights.
You might take a look at Personal Capital. Their free service will answer many of those questions for you and they have a decent retirement simulator to understand what your chances are of having enough money for the rest of your life.
I’ve been working on building this since January. We should have the first version up in a few weeks. Here’s the landing page: https://www.haystack.finance
personal capital is great. Yeah, I get a call from a rep asking for a meeting 1x/year. I politely decline and don't hear again from them til next year...not a big deal for a great 100% hands off dashboard.
They do, but the way they fund the development is to check with people using their platform and ask if they want financial advisement services. It is probably one of the better business models out there that still gives you something valuable for free.
I love Actual, one of the best local-first apps I've used. I'm excited that it's been open sourced, but I also understand that this release is a bit bittersweet. Awesome work James, best of luck in your future endeavors :)
I did the SaaS-side-business thing for about 6 years. Early on I decided the SaaS was going to be my next career move and I would stay at my employer until I could quit employment altogether. A new job means you have to earn your place on a new team and how could I do that successfully with one eye on my SaaS at all times?
When James joined stripe I was surprised both that stripe was agreeable to side projects and that James was courageous enough to try to do both. Open sourcing here just looks like more courage.
Good luck James and congrats on what you’ve built here!
As someone else with a SaaS side business of around the same age, it gets painful around then: You have to make tough decisions and the early fun is gone. Plus keeping up with new and existing customers can make it feel like you're not really steering the ship anymore but being tossed around by the storm.
I understand James's desire to step back, though MIT is an interesting choice since now anyone can do anything with it, including selling it.
What did you end up doing with your SaaS business?
Went full time in 2020! Immediately took an 80% pay cut, but I spend 0 hours in bullshit meetings and no longer have to play the corporate employment game.
Was hoping for that answer. Good for you! I've been weighing when to take the plunge myself. I can't support my family with what mine is making on the side right now (10% of my day job salary), though I know if I were full time on it I'd be seeing more return. Just feels like a high dive into a small pool and I'm trying to suss out the right moment. Any tips/lessons learned?
Double down on anything that has worked to attract new customers. Ask yourself if there was a gun to your head and you HAD to 10x in a year what would you do. Get to a point where it covers your lifestyle and make the leap.
The blog post says 810 paid subscribers, and the price was $4/month so that's $3.2k/month.
I mean that's not bad, that sounds like they'd nearly made it. Maybe they'd need 2-3x that to live off (depending where they live). But if they got that far I sort of feel they might have been able to make it. Then they wouldn't need any other job, they could just live off the product. And then any additional revenue growth would be profit.
I mean they were a lot closer to it being able to sustain them than a business with e.g. $0/month revenue, or e.g. 3 users at $10/month (I've worked for a few such projects without product/market..)
There’s a chance they just needed to raise the price. I wonder how people land on something like $4. At that price your demand for something like this is not price sensitive. $5 and you have 20% growth, $8 and you’ve doubled. To the users it’s just a few bucks.
The thing is, YNAB increased pricing recently and that didn't went well, it caused a pretty negative outlash... Actual was actually a pretty good alternative that was pushed by many people on Reddit, they got quite a bit of free advertising through that. Yearly YNAB is only 8.25$ a month and support syncing through Plaid (which add a few dollars per month for sure to the cost and it also add quite a bit of negative feedback sadly). So yeah he could increase the price for sure, but not by much, and his current customers wouldn't appreciate it that much considering they jumped ship to avoid a price increase in the first place.
I feel like Actual should have way more users, but people were waiting to switch from YNAB until it had every unnecessary feature added. If they knew that postponing their subscription would end in the service shutting down, maybe they would have chosen differently? Actual is completely usable, and reliable as it is. I'm sad that it ended in burnout this way, it is such a good product.
Moreover, everything on the website implies that Actual was a high-end, exactingly designed product for discerning, well-off people. But it was priced like general-audience commodity SaaS. My guess is that most subscribers would have been more than willing to pay, say, 20 dollars a month instead of 4, particularly for something that has "saving you lots of money" as a core value proposition.
would it have been possible to sell the code and business? the author doesn't mention that he explored that option. This seems very sellable.
And like you said, $3.2k/month could go long way in other countries. So it would have been cool to find a buyer/partner who could be aligned with the vision and values of the author.
they mentioned that they need to hire 2 people. so that's a pretty low gross for that. and the expense of running the servers and all that is not included there so net was probably wildly insufficient for that kind of newhire. I'd think spending some money on marketing would have been more prudent.
Mint seems like the most feature rich, but not only do I not want to support their parent company because of their Tax lobbying... but I don't trust them from a privacy standpoint (Considering its free).
YNAB and Monarch both seem like really good options. But I have not looked into them much yet.
I currently use Copilot (iOS only... really just iPhone, no iPad app). I have found it really nice but the lack of a web or iPad app makes doing some tasks more of a pain.
I am curious if anyone has found any that work well for couples that don't have joint finances but do obviously share some expenses. My partner and me struggle with figuring this out and inevitably loose track of certain small things. Rent and standard expenses are easy. But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones.
I know there is an app you can use that you can mark transactions as shared, but I don't want to use that for privacy reasons. I would love if there was an app that had some functionality like that built in without making it so we have one account that just has all of our accounts in it.
I've been using YNAB since March 2014. I started doing manual entry with YNAB4 and was an early adopter of YNAB5.
I manage my own personal budget as well a joint budget for myself and my fiance.
Here's my takeaway:
* The YNAB model to budgeting is how I want all future budgeting tools I use to work. They call the framework "The Four Rules" (https://www.youneedabudget.com/the-four-rules/) and they are a very pragmatic way to think about budgeting.
* Specifically, I like to be able to have my budget cover multiple months into the future. I have fairly bursty and somewhat unpredictable income. I like to have a reserve of 6 months of expenses covered just to make sure that I can handle any ebb and flow of my income.
* I have successfully convinced my partner to use YNAB and they find it valuable. It really is super useful software that is pretty straight forward to use and that makes budgeting very quick and easy.
* Sharing budgets with a partner doesn't really work the way you'd want it to. You would need to share a single set of credentials, and there isn't really any fine grained access controls.
* YNAB has been raising their prices lately, and I think it's reasonable to assume that they are going to be raising them again in the future. I am not convinced that I, personally, am getting value out of the things they say they are improving. While I have a lot of my financial history with them, I'm definitely investigating competitors to see if they would fit my needs. So far, none have but I'm going to keep looking because honestly I'm not sure YNAB is worth $100/yr ($200/yr between my partner and I is fucking crazy).
Overall, would I recommend YNAB? Yeah, probably. I would bet that if you haven't been budgeting before and started using YNAB at the current price that you would probably make at least $100 worth of better financial decisions in the first year. But there's a huge asterisk next to the price.
I remember paying $30 for YNAB4 and being happy with it. They introduced the SaaS version that would sync to import your transactions at $50/yr and I remember thinking that was kinda pricy. You could always import the transactions from your bank by downloading the Quicken files, but I understand they need a subscription model to sustain an actual business around the product.
I am not convinced that the recent price hikes have been justified by an increase in the value of the product.
The price is where I am finding myself hesitant to switch unless I find something that has a life changing feature (like features for couples).
Copilot had a price hike to $9 a month (or $70 a year I believe) but grandfathered everyone who had a subscription for $3 a month "for life" (as long as you have an active subscription).
I do keep hearing great things about YNAB and I don't mind paying for it, but if they are being that aggressive on raising pricing that is concerning.
Or is it concerning that nobody else is raising prices?
We are literally commenting on an article about a similar business that is shutting down due to being unsustainable without price rises.
I was on grandfathered YNAB pricing. The increase isn’t great, but at least I know they are working to make their business sustainable.
Plex has a similar problem, I’m on a grandfathered lifetime license, but without the ongoing revenue they are really struggling to the point the product is now a mess of add-ons and I don’t even use it anymore.
It's YNAB's first price rise in a long time, of 20%, and by putting legacy customers onto the new price they unlocked a lot more revenue than previous price rises. I don't think it's a sign of more future non-grandfathered price rises.
I use a home-grown system[1] that does not require sharing credentials with a third party, has partial/fully automated (depending on financial institution) fetching of transactions, auto-categorization learned from your previously categorized transactions, and the possibility to create pretty dashboards that can be shared with others.
It's surprisingly simple (just a few lines of code) for personal use.
Thanks for the post Sagar, I'm the maintainer of reckon [1], a tool to help categorize transactions, which I used in ledger. There are a lot of interesting tools for doing plain text accounting [2] and I'm always interested in learning about new ones.
Reckon uses TF/IDF with cosine similarity, but I would be interested to see how you use Random Forest. Please post your code somewhere, I'd love to see it and learn something new!
I think Mint announced a few weeks ago native support.
Unfortunately Copilot is the same where you have to do a manual export, which means you only see it at the end of the month. Making it not super useful for tracking your budget as the month goes on.
This has unfortunately lead to my Apple Card rarely being used. Which sucks.
I keep hoping that there is some sort of native data sharing built into iOS so I don't have to log into apple through something like Plaid
Presumably, there are more integrations coming but no information from Apple on this. Seems too good to be true that Apple would offer an API to customers that could be hooked up to a self-hosted Actual instance.
Kind of a bummer that they only have Mint support right now, seems quite at odds with Apple's Privacy goals.
I've enjoyed YNAB a lot for budgeting and been using it for the last 3 years now. Works very well with my spreadsheet brain.
It's got solid APIs if you want to do your own add-ons or integrations too. As an example, a friend of mine who's on the FIRE track has integrated his own layer on top of YNAB for tracking "paid off for life" categories, including budgeting for expected inflation, and allocated against retirement account balances.
Used YNAB4 + 5 for several years and it never really took. I use Tiller.com now - puts all your data into a Google Sheet or Cloud Excel sheet.
It has a bunch of extensions that you can use for budgeting, emailing daily transactions, reporting, optimizing debt payoffs using various different methods, etc.
Plus it's just a spreadsheet, so sorting/filtering etc just work. And it's as fast as having a large Google Sheet. So pretty darn fast.
>But going out, groceries, etc. those are the complicated ones.
Which is why I don't actually track those day-to-day. I'm using revolut and it gives me a pretty decent estimate of spent per category per month, give or take 15%.
Then I use a slightly modified google sheets budgeting template (it's right there) and just put all the numbers there. Quite convenient and you can see all the data + add custom formulas if you want to.
I used to use Mint, moved to Truebill a couple years ago. It's easier to split out and budget discretionary spending and track it over the month. They also do a good job of automatically identifying bills and other repeat charges for review.
Hey James, we’re really sorry to hear about you closing down the business from a revenue standpoint! It sounds like it was the right choice for you though. Thanks for the contribution back to the community, as well as for prettier! We are building a platform to support local-first application development, and have appreciated your various articles / interviews / blog posts about the topic! Best of luck in the future, and thanks again.
We're working on a product in this space. While there is a ton of demand for products like this (the incumbents, like Mint, aren't really evolving or providing the privacy people want), it's not easy to grow. We ended up raising venture capital to bridge the gap, but once we did, things started to come together. In fact, we ended up having a few people who were trying to build an app solo join the team (because they're so passionate about the space, and had build great products, but couldn't get a lot of traction).
Sometimes I feel that society forces us to be economically successful in all aspects of life.
I'm in the first steps of my career, and even though I just want to learn new things and do exciting projects, the first thought that come to my mind when I have an idea to develop is: "How could this be profitable?"
> One thing I'm really excited about open-source is I no longer have to deal with any of the business or deployment stuff. I can focus on being a project manager.
I think that having this feeling it's the best achievement you can get from this.
Interesting. I wonder why James didn't attempt to sell it at the very least?
36K ARR means you could have rather quickly found a buyer for 60k+ and gotten rid of the thing for a small but not in-significant payday. Also i wonder if the users are truly happy with being told they have to migrate to their own server as i'd assume they're the type who'd rather pay $4 a month instead of having to deal with the hassle.
In any case, it's quite a courageous move and seems very well-intentioned.
You have no control over what the buyer would do with it. They might decide to slurp up all of the user financial data flowing through the server, for example. Or they might leak the data due to incompetence. Even in the best of circumstances, the buyer would probably have a plan for increasing revenue, which might mean raising prices, introducing ads, or any number of things that James might not like.
Finally, it sounds like he wants to continue working on the product, just at his own pace, and without the stress of running a business. This would not be an option if he sold.
3k MRR, but with a huge amount of extra stress on top of your full time job. It's not necessarily worth it, and the type of thing that leads to massive burnout.
> In June, all existing subscriptions will be cancelled. Specific dates coming soon.
On one hand, good for being this transparent about it. I'm sure none of these decisions are easy. On the other hand... June is... 6 weeks away? I don't know the size or tech skills of the userbase - perhaps this is a decent time frame? It seems overly aggressive going in to 'shut off' mode so quickly. But... dragging it out longer may not help that many more people.
Probably no simple decisions that don't inconvenience people in the short term, regardless of which way you go.
If the community want to wait, I'm happy to push back the date.
I actually thought it felt less greedy to not wait too long, because doing it in the far future just means people are paying for unsupported software. Happy to keep it running though for as long as people want.
I'm not using your software, but as somebody who has had to switch personal finance apps multiple times, I'd personally want to be able to use it through the end of the year. It's easier to just start a new program at a new year.
I still use YNAB4 regularly. I have a paid copy from before they moved to an online model. I'm running it on ubuntu in wine. It still works fine.
I had never heard of Actual till today. It looks like it would cover my use case. I'm not sure why I would have switched, though, as YNAB4 still works for me and has no recurring charge and is fully local.
I’ve used YNAB before and really liked it, this seems conceptually similar. Did anyone use both and would like to share their experience?
My main problem with YNAB was that entering transactions manually all the time was time consuming, and I wasn’t able to stay consistent for more than a few months at a time (in my country there was no way to import automatically).
I left YNAB when they pulled the bait & switch on pricing with their oldest customers last year. I’ve been looking for something to replace it for awhile now, so I’m going to try this out.
YNAB drastically changed their pricing (double for "grandfathered" customers), but even more importantly American Express import has been broken for about 6 months now. That was the final straw.
We upgraded to SaaS YNAB and suffered through it for years, before dropping it in our house for the same reason. Syncing was broken for a really really long time. We finally reported it, and it was working the next time we checked.
So, their monitoring (if it exists) is not doing its job whatsoever, and they’re relying on customer reports to find out about months-long outages. Not to mention the smaller sync outages that would happen constantly.
We tried to understand the way they want us to deal with credit cards about a dozen times. Never had any interest in learning it and still don’t (because I don’t treat a CC transaction any different from a cash transaction w/r/t budgeting), but the new YNAB forced it on us.
Nothing I’m saying is new. It’s just wild to me how bad their Second System tanked their software & reputation.
> Syncing was broken for a really really long time. We finally reported it, and it was working the next time we checked.
Well they use Plaid, they aren't really responsible for syncing. Most competitor will also use Plaid and have the same issue sadly. Mine also stopped synced recently as my bank updated their website. It took a few weeks before it came back.
> So, their monitoring (if it exists) is not doing its job whatsoever,
Actually Plaid monitoring is quite good (for each bank you get the percent of failed queries), but how fast they react, well that's another ball game and I guess it depends on the amounts of users affected and the amount of works required to fix it.
I was considering working on my own opensource alternative to YNAB and that's why I looked a bit into Plaid. Now that Actual is open source, maybe I won't...
> I don’t treat a CC transaction any different from a cash transaction
Well they aren't different either... I treat both my cash and debit card transactions the same way I treat my credit cards transactions. I add them in their respective accounts and that's it (I only started adding them manually when my bank updated their website, it has gone better than I thought and decided to stay that way for now, never felt comfortable knowing Plaid had my banks credentials).
Maybe what you were confused with was the amounts shown on the Budget side? The credit cards categories act a tiny bit different than the actual categories. I know you said you had no interest in learning, but if you change your mind, I could try explaining how it works.
I guess an issue with credit cards is that it feel like it's actual money, but it's not. That doesn't goes well with zero based budgeting which depends on the fact that you already have the funds to pay for all your spending. You work with past money, not future one.
Sad that this app didn't achieve the scale of subscriptions it deserved. A good reminder that awesome tech isn't usually enough. Do you regret not taking capital to fund marketing and support full time? Or put another way, any other ideas of where you could have spent someone else's money to give you a boost into higher subscription numbers?
Yes I totally regret it. There are ethical VCs that would be willing to invest a small amount and I should have done that. Bootstrapping isn't all it's cracked up to be; there are a lot better and smarter ways to kickstart a project.
but if you can't generate enough revenues to justify valuations you wouldn't go anywhere either. i guess it is better to find that out after raising millions and paying yourself a fat salary
It's in an established and competitive market. There's money flowing into companies doing this same thing. An investor throwing (some) capital at marketing and growth for this totally functional (and beautiful) product could have made sense.
An excel spreadsheet to track reoccuring expenses and income with additions made for upcoming expenses, etc. hyperpersonalized for you has been the best for me, have tried a few budget apps. Micromanaging food expenses should be something that you decide on the spot rather than seeing 600$ on food this month oh-no.
Caveat: Software Engineer salary with large discretionary income
I feel your frustration about business not going as envisioned. My current failure rate is two failed attempts to build profitable busines. Actually the second project is similar to yours. Invoice app for small entrepreneurs. Till today I'm the only user of the app. To reduce costs, I made it run completely without server support, all data is stored in local storage and hosted on netlify for free (no own domain). https://moja--fakturazdarma.netlify.app/. It was nice challenge for me to make it work completely without any backend (generation of pdfs using pdfmake, generating qrcodes and lzma compression ...) I still use it for main own invoicing and use to in my resume as work reference, but with zero money income.
I’d suggest first having an English version of the site and maybe paying for a domain (looks more professional and trustworthy) and you could post it in Product Hunt to have more people discovering it.
Thanks. Sure, I had own domain for a year, made promotion on Facebook. This product was not developed with other countries in mind. Idea was to do pilot in my own country and then scale up. Every country has different invoicing rules, so it cannot be just translated to English and put on US market. But since it didn't attract any single customer, I just gave up as my previous experience was that adding features when there is no traction for MVP just prolong your suffering.
I still have yet to find something that works as well as Microsoft Money. I have to run it on VMWare Fusion on a Mac to make it work. Moneydance is the next closest thing. Something that has real support for investments and tax reporting. Everything else is too... simple.
I'm looking for a solution in this space that lets you plot the waterfall effect. What I'd like this solution to do is the following:
1. Enter all my bills that require full payment each month
2. Enter my bills that can be variably paid (ex. credit cards, medical bills, etc)
3. Enter my monthly income
4. Enter my budgeted personal/home expenses (food, gas/transport, etc)
Then the solution should be able to model a few different paths to maximizing my savings and plot out a waterfall that says if I payoff X over 6 months and pay the minimum on Y then here is what my savings would look like.
I'd like to be able to see what my projected payoff dates for different bills are and what my projected savings look like if I was to follow the model.
Hi! Saw your remarks about the difficulty of maintaining mobile apps - I agree this is an extremely large overhead, Apple and Google make it an absolute pain most of the time, but if you are willing to put in initial effort to port the screens / main functionality to a mobile friendly website, you can create a hybrid app through a WebView and significantly reduce the shipping times / app store burdens (and most updates, if not all, can go through the web and thus webview, instead of having to build and ship a native app(s)!)
If it helps. I don't know the technicalities of the mobile app at all, i.e. how many native functionalities the mobile app needs, if any.
I work for a company that does this kind of product for banks. We spend a huge amount of time integrating our solution into traditional banks contexts. There for sure is a lot of overhead. But being inside banks also gives you better data access.
I've used both. firefly-iii is a fairly good, easy to maintain and host, web app. It's not as good design or UX as Actual - especially since firefly-iii has no mobile experience to speak of. Acutal had great mobile apps. firefly's budgeting interface is a bit of a UX mess.
Would be curious if you'd be open to talking about some of the history in terms of user growth, revenue and costs. Just curious about how these types of projects go.
If the final user numbers are accurate, revenue was a bit over $3k a month. Not even enough to really pay the founder if living in the US. Assuming $200/mo for servers, backups, and help desk software, that doesn't leave much after taxes for take home pay.
As someone who just discovered this software, I am now really curious to give it a try!
I launched around 3 years ago, and it was brutally slow. I think it took a year to hit 100 subscribers.
Another year to hit 300.
This past fall, YNAB increased their prices which gave me decent jump from around 500 to 800 subscribers which is where I'm at today.
I did everything wrong when it comes to marketing and getting subscribers. I focused on the tech and never invested in content, building hype, etc. Well, I take that back -- sometimes I did, but only 10% instead of 70% like I should have been doing.
As a bootstrapped solo founder myself (even though I have somehow built a small team after 7 years), I totally get what you are saying. Be proud of what you did and most don't even get to do what you did. It is so hard to do things alone and especially when you realize it is mostly about Marketing and Sales (and not the product only).
I'm a firm believer that the only way to stand out in the B2C world is to have a VC backed marketing budget. You can't bootstrap a positive CAC in a reasonable timeframe without going bankrupt as a solo founder.
I really wish people would utilize the web more rather than heading for the app ecosystems. From the article it's not clear if this is possible due to some particular tech choices they have made but in general it can reduce overhead quite a lot.
If you have a few hundred subscribers and you can do with one engineer less that can make a huge financial difference.
I’m working on a similar product at https://mygraph.ca and always looked up to James and Actual. Great product and well engineered.
It was amazing to see how productive he has been the past few years working on it while also being at Stripe. Not surprised to hear it got to be a bit much.
If it's running locally (or in a cloud the user choses to trust), it doesn't need to be a CRDT any more to get the same security properties, which would ironically mean it is now easier to develop.
(Granted CRDTs might enable other features although OT is generally considered simpler)
The most critical feature I need for a budgeting app is account syncing. Does anyone know any service like this that allows me to automatically import transaction data from accounts?
I currently use Personal Capital which works pretty well for integrations.
I wish people wouldn't use "we open sourced it" as a synonym for "this product is dead". Especially for a SaaS company, there is a totally valid business strategy in open sourcing your codebase but continuing to provide a paid SaaS offering for users that are not interested in self-hosting.
It causes confusion every time a company open sources their software. Always have to wonder, "Is it dead and they are yeeting it over the fence?"
To be fair, the email they sent to their newsletter list is more succinct and clear about their services shutting down:
>>>
This will be the last email you ever receive from Actual. You are receiving this because you are a subscriber or have used Actual in the past.
Actual is moving to an open-source model and will be 100% free.
This means our subscription syncing service will be shutting down in the future. We have instructions for setting up your own server, letting you completely own your data and have syncing for free.
Even that part is kind of misleading. Making the software open source doesn't mean that the subscription service has to shut down; those are two different decisions.
But maybe we don't have to be too critical. I tend to read "[project you've never heard of] is going open-source" as "here's a new project you might want to check out", but even if they really mean that the project is mostly shutting down, open sourcing it is a good thing to do.
I don't necessarily interpret it as a synonym, more that these are two events that naturally coincide. IMO it's better to decide to open source a product when it dies than to annihilate it. If nothing else, people may be able to learn something from the source.
I agree, better to open source a product then to just let it die off. I just wish companies were honest in their headline ("this product didn't work out, here's the source") instead of trying to spin it.
I work for Red Hat, we do it all the time. We often acquire closed source companies and then release the software as open-source, while continuing to offer it.
Blender 3D might be one of the more well-known success stories in that regard. Godot game engine also perhaps? Gotta be more'n a few others as well, I'm sure. Those are just two that instantly come to mind for me (being a couple of my favorites that were both closed source at one time in their history and have gone on to massive and continual success since their open sourcing).
Unrelated, I'm looking for something that can help me create finance projections.
Eg: How's my account going to look like in the next 3 months if I go for a holiday.
This seems to be exactly what ProjectionLab[1] is for. I am not a user or affiliated with it.. just learned about it the other day on some HN thread and thought it looked cool.
Thanks for sharing. I did see that. Unfortunately a bit too focused on retirement for my liking. I want to see more granular time period which doesn't seem to be possible there.
Shameless plug: OP mentioned Plaid as a way to sync bank accounts, but if anyone wants to use a Plaid alternative in Europe, check out Nordigen (it's free).
oh, you just casually drop this. like these latest years has been heckin stupid and you just do such nice thing. heckin legend. if there is a creator ill tell them youre a good person. legend.
There are few importers available which have been opensourced (look at the Actual's github org), I have only tried one during migration from greedy YNAB.
There is also an API which works quite well. I am using it to import transactions from Revolut. So no Open Banking yet, but afaik it's painful to get in the UK anyways
> You could even hook up your own bank syncing -- Plaid support a free development plan that covers an individual user. In fact, you'll see Plaid support in the syncing server because I already started building this out.
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This is the part that resonates a lot with me even though I have been able to build a small business that is reasonably successful with a small team but it takes a toll. It is a frikin slog and there are days when you feel like jumping off a cliff. Also the cost of doing something so small can add up when you can have a cushy tech job making 200K relatively easy. To do your own thing requires a very different mindset and incredibly hard.
There is a HUGE difference between building a quick side project for fun VS turning it into a real business (no matter how small). I have full sympathy for the owner and totally understand where they are coming from. No judgement and I wish them all the best.