Experience of “normal” hosting costs in SaaS?

Question

As our SaaS startup increases we did hit the 10k monthly active users a few months ago. One of our main questions we try to figure it is: Are our hosting costs in range of "normal"?Currently we do pay ~ $1.5k in app server and storage plus ~ $4.5k in database. This is roughly $0.5 per user per month.I understand this differs a lot depending on the software provided, but still very interested in other numbers and opinions. What is your experience with hosting costs in SaaS business?

officialchicken · Accepted Answer

That's at least 3x - 5x my experience, and I'm typically running 3-4 environments (dev, qat, prd) at full utilization (24 x 7); stg enviro as needed. Normally I host using a mix of AWS and CloudFlare; costs with Google Cloud are similar. Your db expenses seem high for so few users, I've seen (and rewritten) those kinds of rates when apps were built using mlab DBaaS / mongo on K8s a few times. If your app is very write heavy using a RDBMS those kinds of fees aren't too unusual. For HIPAA/SOX/isolated apps I normally estimate around 10x a non-isolated environment.

treis · Answer

Cost per user is a meaningless metric for comparison. Different applications will have different loads per user.That said that seems to be a lot of money for that many users. But not anywhere near crippling if you are charging decent money for your service.

leros · Answer

It really really depends.Something like serving mostly static content is very different from something like analyzing lots of large video feeds.

Experience of “normal” hosting costs in SaaS?

Cost per user is a meaningless metric for comparison. Different applications will have different loads per user.
That said that seems to be a lot of money for that many users. But not anywhere near crippling if you are charging decent money for your service.

It really really depends.
Something like serving mostly static content is very different from something like analyzing lots of large video feeds.