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It isn't even true there. This is one of the common misconceptions that show up in blogs. There's no such thing as a minimum metric for an A - SaaS or otherwise.


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Most SaaS platforms don't really measure it. They just "do their best".

Plus, it's hard to quantify many cases because there is hard-down and soft-down (partial interruptions).


There are no metrics. Everybody is pushing now for SaaS. We don't have enough e-waste.

It's definitely too low, and we're tweaking it. Patrick McKenzie (patio11) had some great things to say on this topic recently[1].

We have no plans to build our own platform. Right now Shogun helps people to build pages, but not measure or improve their performance. These are areas we're interested in exploring.

[1] https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/business-of-saas


If that’s your opinion I’d like to hear your rebuttal to this [1]. It’s hard to argue against actual numbers for an actual production app running at actual scale.

[1] https://www.troyhunt.com/serverless-to-the-max-doing-big-thi...


I hate such titles with a passion. I wonder if people will ever realize that "X monthly users" means absolutely nothing. That's by far the most useless metric people have come up with. This is the exact equivalent of "costs of living healthy":

1. How do you define "healthy". 2. Genetic abilities. 3. Overall health. 4. Eating habits. 5. Your geographical location. 6. Your daily routine ..... X^60000. {Factor number X^60000}

There are an infinite amount of buttons and dials that will determine how much "X monthly users" will set you back. Back in 2011 I used to own a blog that had something along the lines of 25k daily visitors. My annual bill was less than 100 bucks, domain included. And keep in mind that this was way before AWS, GCP and Azure came into the picture and costs were much higher than they are now. But I had spent months investigating the cheapest and most efficient ways to cut down costs. And it's the same with cloud providers - they can be brutally expensive or dirt cheap for the exact same thing if you don't take your time to see which and what is the best solution for your use case.


You could read that ratio as a limit on infrastructure overhead that one should have. Unless you’re in the IaaS business, I guess.

Maybe the metric they're judged on is "connections" (Taking a hint from that memo in the sibling comment) not sales or even users.

It might be better seen as an observation of a quality of a good SAAS business. Maybe no one knows.

Why is pi ~3.14159?


Not quite: that figure was chosen because most applications won't exceed it. It's not an arbitrary number.

> At one request per day ...

There is where our expectations diverge. Do you really expect one request per day for a small side-project? Or even for a moderate start-up?

I find that astonishing. I admit I only have a few thousand users, but I've had a total of three requests.


it's definitely not zero. if you have a million machines in your data centers then it easily adds up to something quantifiable.

just is positive assessment about relative size. I could be wrong about positive statement of course. But it seems very low amount for a cloud service.

I wast trying to understand how business thinking work. Not judge or praise it.


I work for a fairly large app and that certainly is not the case for us.

> AirBnB runs thousands of compute instances and handles hundreds of terabytes of data with only five IT staff.

I'm not sure how they're measuring IT staff, but having worked at Airbnb I can't think of any sane definition of "IT staff" that would lead to this count.


Minimum baselines are insignificant to actual load in the real world.

> It can handle more than 500,000 orders per month when hosted on a $6/month server

Is this a statement from the real world? What business sells 500,000 orders in a month from a $6 server? I mean, if you sell that much, you would probably want a high-availability solution and they don't sell for 6 bucks.


My first thought is that that figure seems somewhat low for an established company with 750k users (even if a significant proportion are not paying customers).

You're right, page count is not the best metric. Instead you can just look up the hosting costs in their yearly report and find out it's a pittance compared to all their other spending and declining in relation.

> Our single <$5,000 box handles about 4M pageviews per day without moving the cpu above 5% steady state. That's the sort of baseline I'm used to from the Microsoft stack

You realize how meaningless a statement like this is, right? You just can't go around talking about "pageviews" as if they were some uniform measure of workload.

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