I’ve just never seen bandwidth be a significant part of the bill for any sass I’ve built/worked for. I’m super curious about this. What kind of sass businesses use huge amounts of bandwdith but don’t provide enough commercial value to the customers to make it viable? Can folks with first-hand experience please share here?
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Bandwidth is rarely an issue if you're transferring mostly text, often an issue if you're transferring images (except for highly cacheable static images), and always an issue if you're transferring video or game assets. That's just how it works because the orders of magnitude differ so much.
An image resource can easily be 100x some text (or HTML or API response), and a video can easily be 1000x an image.
Another factor is cacheability. If you're a B2B SaaS business you'll have few clients and can take advantage of caching much more typically. If you're B2C that flips and caching might not provide much benefit.
Anecdotally, on a medium sized ecommerce store, AWS egress for product images was a huge cost.
Thank you, the e-commerce example is definitely something I hadn’t thought about. Having high quality imagery helps make sales but comes at a cost. Looking around at some sites I buy from, I think I can squint and see this “out in plain sight”.
In fact an interesting detail of the ecommerce image situation is that you can somewhat trade-off bandwidth and compute. Creating resized images is expensive (we had ~2m unique images viewed per month), but if you can resize an image down and compress it well you might save 80% of the bandwidth on it, and deliver a better UX due to faster images. We did a bit of modelling to figure out how many sizes we wanted to deliver in order to get the best compute/bandwidth trade-off. This can be tricky for many companies but we were in a weird position because we had a large catalog compared to order volume, because of how the business worked.
Video is an even better one. While we didn't have to deal with it in ecommerce, so many social applications are built around video. That doesn't necessarily mean YouTube/TikTok/etc, but also smaller things like BeReal who I'd guess are built entirely on cloud infra, even embedded videos in Mastodon posts. A similar thing could even be said about Podcasting/audio – not as bad as video, but there are specialist podcast hosts for a reason, and it's not that they do a great job, it's because they have cheap bandwidth.
Why does it need to be sass?
My problem was hosting too many photos on the landing pages. Like literally like 60 photos on 4 different landing pages.
The page looked fantastic and people would email me that I have the best site on the internet. But if I ever went viral, I'd always go down. I have since changed so the pages only have like 20 pictures now.
I only now became profitable, and it has little to do with anything other than waiting for word of mouth to take over.
This might seem like a crappy business, but now its a few thousand per year passive profit. Who knows what the future holds. Its year 7 and the growth is exponential despite me ending all marketing.
100% - referencing SaaS is just me being narrow minded. Your example hits close to home for me. I feel that the more creative people (like but not limited to technical folks) can try new things without economic penalties, the more we all benefit from the inevitable innovations. Compared to how things worked when I started I love how inexpensive experiments are today, even the ones that don’t “blow up”. I totally see your point, too — there is still some weighty risks and egress costs can be one of them.