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The Facebook comparison is nowhere close though. Firstly, even purely from a services perspective, the per user compute needs per person are quite insane if you take a step back and think about what all has to happen in the background. Then you have to think about how much each user uses facebook and instagram, not to mention other services like video calls and live. Further, Facebook also ostensibly spends a bunch of the resources directly making money by utilising the resources on their ad biz. And then you have all the research and prototype work Facebook does. Finally this also includes office buildings and actual machine expenditure which ostensibly will pay dividends in future years, plus being a factor that OP didnnot even include in this discussion. I'm fairly confident that for the same number of requests of compwrable complexity Facebook spends significantly less than what this person is spending.

All of this just seems to be agreeing with the parent comment's point that different websites do different amounts of work per user.

It does not just agree; it suggests explanations.

I suspect that one particular aspect of Facebook's operations - the nation-state level of spying on its users and the people they mention - accounts for a significant part of the difference.

This app appears to be dedicated to incrementing counters in a database.

I don't even understand why they need a VPS at all. It seems simple to run off of firebase and cloudflare for the UI.

That seems to include all the facebook services including instagram.

That's intriguing. That means that they make significantly more than $8/uyr in selling your personal data to advertisers.

It's interesting if they count people that "have no account" data of which they also monetize.

8$, just for infrastructure? So their costs per user is even higher?

-> Facebook is making far more than 10$ per user? Jesus Christ.

Facebook average revenue per user in 2019 was USD 29.25

Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/234056/facebooks-average...

> It isn't that Facebook is wasting the vast majority of their infrastructure, though, it's that the application does a lot more for each user.

I don't think we can be sure Facebook isn't wasting money on their infrastructure. They've shown themselves to be pretty wasteful in the past.[0][1] They're just rich enough to get away with it.

Facebook's application may be doing a lot more to their users than a simpler app, but I doubt it's doing that much for users.

[0] https://www.cio.com/article/3197554/why-is-facebooks-ios-app...

[1] https://jaxenter.com/facebooks-completely-insane-dalvik-hack...

But if they can choose between saving 10% on infrastructure or adding 5% ad revenue (through more optimizations), the additional revenue is worth more.

Just running Facebook, Instagram & Co as a platform would probably be much cheaper than $8 per user.

Absolutely. Profligacy is often the rational course in a capitalist system.

so true

In any system, there will be a tension between shrinking cost/benefit, and spending more to achieve better benefit-cost. This has nothing to do with capitalism. It's a fundamental aspect of systems where there is a non-fixed relationship between investment and return (i.e. almost all systems of any kind).

The notion that "[financial] investment and [financial] return" are the only two factors worth considering in "all systems of any kind" is an artefact of capitalist thinking.

That notion is something absent from both text and subtext of my comment. You are the one who inserted it. Investment and cost come in many forms other than the financial.

That's assuming you have the add inventory a some point reducing costs make sense