Tarsnap reaches profitability
[I meant to write this last week, but instead I spent several days tracking down a nasty bug in tarsnap. The first rule of software engineering: Schedules slip. I'm sure I made the right choice, though, in setting this aside to fix the bug -- fixing bugs in tarsnap will always be more important than writing blog posts.]One of the most common questions I receive about tarsnap is this: What guarantee can I provide that the tarsnap service will continue to operate? This is a reasonable concern; after all, with services like Omnidrive and HP Upline shutting down, what guarantee is there that tarsnap won't also shut down? Until recently, the best answer I could give was "trust me"; but now I can give a much better answer: As of the end of February, tarsnap is profitable.
Now, this is only under the most limited definition of profitable:
In February, tarsnap had more income than expenses; but it isn't paying
me a salary yet. Tarsnap isn't making enough profit to pay for my
living expenses (Paul Graham uses the wonderful phrase
"ramen
profitable" to describe this), never mind matching what I could earn
by working elsewhere; and it hasn't made enough profit to cover its
accrued losses (either those in the three months between moving into
public beta and becoming profitable, or the expenses during the lengthy
unpaid private beta testing period), never mind matching what I could
have earned over the past two years if I had decided not to work on
tarsnap.
Nevertheless, I think this is a sensible definition of "profitable" to
use, for the following reason: Tarsnap pretty much runs itself. The
most time consuming thing I do each day to keep tarsnap running is read
daily accounting reports to see if there are any accounts which have had
negative balances for too long and need to be deleted (for obvious
reasons, this is something I'm very wary about automating): While I
still spend most of each day working on tarsnap, I'm working on making
tarsnap better, not simply on keeping it running. If for
some reason I decided to stop working on tarsnap and find other
employment -- and at the moment it would take a lot to convince me to do
that, since I really enjoy what I'm doing -- it would mean that tarsnap
would stop getting better; but as long as tarsnap is profitable and
essentially self-running, there's no reason why I would ever shut it
down.
Do I hope that tarsnap will become more profitable? Of course -- my
hope is that someday tarsnap's profits will make up for the two years I
spent writing code without income. But things are moving in the right
direction now; all that remains is for tarsnap to grow, and so far --
at least based on everybody I've talked to -- the existing tarsnap users
are enthusiastic enough to convince many times their number to try
tarsnap.
Time to go back to working towards passphrased key files... expect some
interesting cryptographic news here later this month.