Authors:
Chris and I ran through some numbers tonight. We came up with some initial figures for potential userbase and costs.
Example:
- 5,000 subscribers @ $20 / year
- 1st year income = $100,000
- Taxes = -$30,000
- Bandwidth + Hosting = -$15,000
- Net Income = $55,000
The Planet offers hosting packages at about $0.28 per GB-month, which would give us 800 MB per user per month as a target bandwidth usage number. Overages cost $0.50 per GB however. If we can keep data transfer per user to 800MB, we'll hit just over 50% of the bandwidth budget. If they average 1000MB per month we would exhaust our bandwidth budget. Also note that overhead and differences in reporting could mean that we really do want to target for 50% usage to avoid the overage fees. At any rate, this gives us a design guideline:
800MB per user per month data transfer limit - in other words: be efficient!
[$394/mo hosting package with 3500GB data transfer] 800MB * 5000 = 4000GB [500GB overage or $250/mo] Total monthly cost = $644 [room for an extra 2500GB per month] Yearly cost = $7,728 with $8k buffer
We also considered options such as for-pay expansion packs a la WoW.
- say $30 to buy, $10 to subscribe each year
- with subsequent expansions at $20
