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Comment by lifeisloving

8 hours ago

Why is a 300k mrr company (his tiwtter bio) running on raleway?

You may think that sounds like a very nice salary but $4MM annual gross is a very small business. I can’t imagine how Railway would be in business if that were considered a large customer.

  • Sure, I guess there are a ton of dumb people. But please name a few sites that aren't slop ecom fly by nights... I cant think of any serious business that runs on raleway.

    I dont understand using any PaaS that essentially functions by arbitraging aws to people that are scared of an aws dashboard at a 3x markup.

    Seems like a decent platform for toy projects not for enterprise.

    • Maybe I'm finally old, but I don't see how it's surprising that Raleway is at all successful. Heroku built the same business ~15 years ago and had plenty of "enterprise" clients. I don't really understand if there's that much more value in Raleway vs Vercel, and Vercel claims to have OpenAI and Meta as clients.

      1 reply →

300K ARR means you get 300K in annual recurring revenue.

Subtract costs for employees. Which, given current economy and inflation, that gets you a founder scraping on their savings, one or two other people (remember that if you're paying someone unless it's totally offshored through a house which has it's own inflation, you have other factors) and then your own taxes... yeah... much more than that and you are in the black.

As a general factor I keep in mind, when I worked at a 'normal' but toxic place before I was an actual software engineer, my manager's rules were something like '40 percent L2R' (might have been lower) for in-house employees and 70- 80% L2R for contractors.

IOW, for every dollar billed for an actual employee, we paid the employee 40 cents. For every dollar billed for a contractor, we paid them 70-80 cents.

I've heard similar figures from others (e.x. 'in house employee has a real cost of 1.5-2x their actual pay').

And yes it sucks and yes the structure at least here in the US is a factor.