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Comment by koolba | Hacker News Reader

> If you have a paid individual or organizational npm account, you can start using hooks right now.

Okay that eliminates the vast majority of npm users.

> Each user may configure a total of 100 hooks, and how you use them is up to you: you can put all 100 on a single package, or scatter them across 100 different packages.

Only a hundred even with a paid account? That's pretty light.

I'm not a big fan of vendor lock in but this is the type of thing that would be nice to have as a public service on SNS. Call it a "NaaS" (Notifications as a Service). It could be as simple as an SNS topic that allows for public subscriptions with subscribers paying their usage bills (which honestly would be tiny if not zero).

I suppose that wouldn't handle the the private repo situation (since you wouldn't want to publicize events regarding them) but for the majority using public repos it'd be a win.

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we're still playing around with how many hooks to give each account- and we're definitely open to increasing it. this is why we're releasing in beta.

as for it being paid, our registry is super expensive to run, so we're looking for ways to make money to support it. this is one way to encourage people to pay for their accounts. this also keeps our prices super low (we start at 7$ a month).

> we're still playing around with how many hooks to give each account- and we're definitely open to increasing it. this is why we're releasing in beta.

Makes sense. I can imagine that if this was released to everybody, immediately, and people set up their CI servers to auto update dependencies on hook, and leftpad got updated, that'd be a serious thundering herd.

> as for it being paid, our registry is super expensive to run, so we're looking for ways to make money to support it. this is one way to encourage people to pay for their accounts. this also keeps our prices super low (we start at 7$ a month).

+1 to telling it like it is. I definitely get way more than $7/mo of value out of npm.

Are the costs of npm public? Is it mostly bandwidth costs for transferring the tarballs?

> a serious thundering herd

hehe yup, def want to avoid that

> Are the costs of npm public? Is it mostly bandwidth costs for transferring the tarballs?

the costs aren't but that's an interesting idea. i'll bring it up with the team.

and as for the origin of the cost, transferring the tarballs is a big part but there are other parts of the infra that are also 'spensive. there are a lot of packages, and a lot of users, and a lot of downloads. we're working on reducing the cost of the registry at the same time as trying to increase revenue- hitting the problem from both sides :)

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