bluebeel (u/bluebeel)

bluebeel commented on Storage on Vercel vercel.com/blog/vercel-st... · Posted by u/drecoe

Consumers have always been willing to pay a premium for simplicity & convenience. No difference here: devs will pay for DX.

bluebeel · 3 years ago

I understand that bu Vercel KV is almost 2x more expensive than Upstash. Even the vercel/kv package is just a wrapper for upstash/redis - I mean what is the benefit of using Vercel KV instead of Upstash? What DX is improved? Upstash offers a nice UI and easy integration with edge functions and lambas functions. It's the same with neon database and cloudflare r2. The only plus value I see is the centralised dashboard. Paying 2x for a single dashboard?

bluebeel commented on Storage on Vercel vercel.com/blog/vercel-st... · Posted by u/drecoe

bluebeel · 3 years ago

the margin that vercel makes on these products that you can easily integrate with nextjs (or anything else that runs on their infra) is crazy. All of them offer easy integration with the edge or lambas functions... I don't see how vercel justifies this price outside of DX

bluebeel commented on Show HN: Hodho – Minimalist Wistia Alternative hodho.com... · Posted by u/bluebeel

XCSme · 5 years ago

I understand now, that is reasonable.

One question is how you know the time watched? Does this mean that every video sends analytics to your server to analyze time watched per video?

bluebeel · 5 years ago

Yes exactly. When a video is playing, it send anonymous metrics about the time watched and other video metrics (play/pause/seeking,...)

bluebeel commented on Show HN: Hodho – Minimalist Wistia Alternative hodho.com... · Posted by u/bluebeel

XCSme · 5 years ago

I am actually looking for a long time to video-hosting alternatives to YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia.

The pricing seems a bit hard to understand what it means in the real workd.

> 600 hours watched time/month

This is only around 7200 views of a 5 minute video, which translates to around 240 daily visitors on a landing page. Are all the alternatives using the same "hours watched" pricing model?

bluebeel · 5 years ago

The pricing of Wistia and many others is based on bandwidth. All plans on Wistia come with 200 GB of bandwidth then it's $0.33/GB. According to their bandwith predictor, for the example you gave 7200 views is equivalent to 202GB so you exceed their limit.

Now my point is that it's complicated to determine exactly how much a video is going to consume. Each provider has their own calculation. I'm going on a per minute view time basis instead. Indeed if you have only one video in your account, to reach 600 hours/month you need 7200 views. But you assume that the video is watched at 100% which is very optimistic. If your video is viewed 90% you have 8000 views. If it is watched 50, 14,400 views.

> 8000 views is 224 GB on the Wistia calculator and so it costs you $7.92 more.

> 14400 views is 404 GB and therefore you get $67.32.

I wanted to test a new approach to pricing. In the future there may be some adjustments to the quantity levels or the addition of higher third parties. I'll probably add a little calculator on the pricing page so you can test and compare how much hodho would cost compared to the solution you're already using.

If you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact me. Hopefully I've been clear enough.

bluebeel commented on Show HN: Hodho – Minimalist Wistia Alternative hodho.com... · Posted by u/bluebeel

bluebeel · 5 years ago

Hello HN!

I wanted to share something I’ve been working on for the past couple of months. Several acquaintances wanted a simple video hosting platform, and they didn’t want to go through Vimeo or YouTube. Having used Wistia before, I propose this one because it’s a great tool, but they are not attracted because they have to pay $99 as soon as they have over 3 videos and/or want to put their branding on the player. So they kindly ask me to do you know IT stuff to make this for them. I did it once, twice, three times... and I just thought why don’t I make a platform for it. And thus was born Hodho an alternative of Wistia.

Hodho is a simple Nestjs application backed by a PostgresSQL database. On the frontend, I use React. About analytics, I only collect information useful to understand how your video is viewed. I don’t know if John Doe in his house in Seattle watched the video at 1PM. If the user has put the DNT in his browser, I don’t retrieve the information from the browser, country, language.

The demo video comes from the transistor.fm website. Justin Jackson has kindly accepted to let me use the player for showcase purposes.

I would love to hear your feedback. Thanks and smile! :)

bluebeel commented on Show HN: Soldit, Selling digital products made easy soldit.co... · Posted by u/bluebeel

jacobovidal · 7 years ago

Are you the same as checkoutpage.co?

bluebeel · 7 years ago

Yes we can say that checkoutpage is one of my direct competitor. Checkoutpage offers more features than me (at least for now) but the big difference is that I wanted to focus on a feature and master it well. In my case, the sale of digital products. The whole application is focused on that.

bluebeel commented on Show HN: Soldit, Selling digital products made easy soldit.co... · Posted by u/bluebeel

bluebeel · 7 years ago

I designed this to be a simple Stripe-backend-as-a-service for people who want to sell their digital products with ease. The key differences between this and Stripe? What I gives you is - you don't need a server only a Stripe account!

If you use the old Stripe Checkout yourself, adding the widget to your front end is really easy - but you also need to provide some code in the backend that processes your form submission and then does the token exchange with Stripe to actually make the charge on the customer's account. If you use their new Checkout, you are redirected to their site where all the payment is taken care of and you no longer need a backend. But Stripe only manages the payment so you will need one way or another to provide your digital products to your customers. It will surely be necessary that you implement this or find a software or site which can do it for you.

So I come to provide a solution to this problem. You connect your Stripe account, then you can simply upload your product, enter the price and start selling on social media or your own website. SOLDIT takes care of file storage, payment processing and product delivery to your customers. Plus, you’ll get paid right away on your Stripe account.

In the future, I intend to add features such as coupons and integrations with Mailchimp and this kind of service.

Bluebeel

bluebeel commented on Show HN: Soldit, Selling digital products made easy soldit.co... · Posted by u/bluebeel

jacobovidal · 7 years ago

I don't understand the product. Why would someone use Soldit instead of directly using Stripe?

bluebeel · 7 years ago

I designed this to be a simple Stripe-backend-as-a-service for people who want to sell their digital products with ease.

The key differences between this and Stripe? What I gives you is - you don't need a server only a Stripe account!

If you use the old Stripe Checkout yourself, adding the widget to your front end is really easy - but you also need to provide some code in the backend that processes your form submission and then does the token exchange with Stripe to actually make the charge on the customer's account. If you use their new Checkout, you are redirected to their site where all the payment is taken care of and you no longer need a backend. But Stripe only manages the payment so you will need one way or another to provide your digital products to your customers. It will surely be necessary that you implement this or find a software or site which can do it for you.

So I come to provide a solution to this problem. You connect your Stripe account, then you can simply upload your product, enter the price and start selling on social media or your own website. SOLDIT takes care of file storage, payment processing and product delivery to your customers. Plus, you’ll get paid right away on your Stripe account.

In the future, I intend to add features such as coupons and integrations with Mailchimp and this kind of service.