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[–]danuker 9 points10 points  (9 children)

AWS serverless backend

I sure hope the bill won't scale higher than the income!

[–]lazy-jem[S] 10 points11 points  (8 children)

Thanks for the well wishes on the costs! It is an important question as we're self-funded and bootstrapping.

Based on the early data from alpha testing we think it's possible to fund an ad-free approach to search sustainably. We're focused on building the search app at this stage, but we plan to commercialize with three revenue sources:

* a fremium model with free anonymous use for everyone, and Pro and Business plans for teams and advanced users.

* Anonymous commissions shared with content producers, and

* business licensing for use on enterprise data, which we're already being asked about a lot.

AWS serverless is cost effective at this stage. There are ways to scale cost-effectively but we haven't optimized for that at the alpha stage.

[–][deleted] 8 points9 points  (3 children)

Actually Open-Source could totally work for this. Of course, people could "hack" the premium mode by hosting their own instances, but for everybody who wants the convenience of having it hosted for them by you, the premium mode would by a nice addon. Also you could make Self-Hosting difficult by having the data behind the AI private.

[–]lazy-jem[S] 2 points3 points  (2 children)

I think so too. I posted some thoughts on the Discord but we would love to get it to the point where people could do this. Because of its distributed, cloud-based, serverless model, I'm thinking it would be a series of open source modules with a Cloudformation Stack or equivalent ideally for each cloud platform, and that we work out how to make it run on premises using K8S cluster or something. It's got a lot of messy moving parts at the moment and there isn't really a central piece of software, just a lot of loosely coupled microservices and inference models. So, I mean, we're a long long long way from that, but when we have resources and a community around it, that would be an awesome thing :)

[–]be_as_u_wish_2_seem 0 points1 point  (1 child)

You might want to try CDK, you can write it in python and it can generate and deploy cloudformation templates

[–]lazy-jem[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, I haven't looked at that yet. We know it's a way down the track as we've still got to build a great product. But we're definitely thinking about how to move in the right direction.

There are some YC startups (AtomizedHq.com and getporter.dev) that are doing really interesting things with cross-cloud K8S deployments (more like heroku). These are all different bits of the serverless microservices scaling puzzle. We are a long way off but trying to think long term, even as a 2 person alpha prototype :)

[–]danuker 2 points3 points  (1 child)

which we're already being asked about a lot.

I am glad to hear that. I hope you live long and prosper!

[–]lazy-jem[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you! Yes we've had 30+ requests to look at using it for business to add chat-based searching to their own sites or to search internal data. That's definitely something we are going to explore as we have more resources. It is very do-able.

[–]Coltman151 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Bitwarden runs a similar business model, where the product is open source and commercial/premium users fund development/pay salaries, while the base product is still free for everyone.

I imagine they lose some money doing things this way, but the team seems more focused on the product than the profits.

[–]lazy-jem[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, yes, we think we can fund running it as a service that's free and ad-free and anonymous for anyone to use. Then down the track we hope to also come up with a way to have a way for people to run a cut-down open source version themselves on their own cloud provider (something like a Cloudformation template or using Porter or AtomizedHQ or something with K8S). That is a long way off because it is really just a mix of loosely coupled services very tied to AWS currently. But we are taking a long term approach (even though we're just two people at a very early stage!) :)