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Comment by lifeisloving | Hacker News Reader

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.

The average business in America has a revenue around $1.2-$2.5 million depending on how you define "business".

Median annual revenue for a small business (or just business) is a paltry $280k.

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.

Never underestimate the power of good UX and tooling. I’m not really familiar with Railway, but Heroku (and Vercel) made their business around ease of use and good DX and tools. It’s sadly not a great long term business strategy because there a price point where it’s cheaper to pay someone to deal with AWS or Azure for you.

They claim 31% of the Fortune 500 are customers: https://railway.com/customers

Yes, they should be charging 6x if they want to hunt the big fish.

> But please name a few sites that aren't slop ecom fly by nights.

https://railway.com/customers

tripadvisor and bilt, maybe?

It's pretty common to have "toy" infrastructure in a non-tech business

Not sure where you see TripAdvisor on there? And what even is bilt?

TripAdvisor is there in the scrolling names. Intuit and Congnizant too.

Of course "uses" doesn't mean they run critical services.

I find it very funny when people put the link of their company in their bio (that's fine and normal) and next to it the ARR it brings (who cares ??). It *really* makes you look like those influencer-entrepreneur-scammer who claim to have 10 side projects making 2B ARR but still somehow spend their time selling you courses on how to be like them instead of taking care of their companies. Your client do NOT care about your ARR (well to an extent), so why is it something you are so keen on advertising

it's called building in public, e.g. see http://trustmrr.com. they're not putting it there for clients, but for others in the huge community of indie hackers/saas entrepeneurs on x

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.

If your overhead for an employee is 60% you need to seriously rethink some things

You mean things in addition to your use of railway

I do think Railway's founders have been a little overconfident with some statements like this:

  Technical people should understand they're going to get their ass beat by non-technical people right now

  You don't need to know how to code to write Rust anymore

  Stop pearl clutching and start problem solving

I guess you can't vibe "make sure my secrets store is secure".

Or:

  The implementation no longer matters

  People really, really need to understand that

I think the implementation matters more than ever. With agentic AI you have a lot more choices for the implementation, too.

The uncharitable take (for them) is that it turns out, knowing how to code is important after all.

The cynical take for the state of the industry, which is maybe more aligned with Railway's statements, is that even people who do know how to code can get hacked, given how good the LLMs are at attacking targets now.

I imagine both camps would agree that without a red team that's leveraging the frontier, you're much more likely to fall victim to an attack.

Lots of companies run on railway

And by choosing a single point of failure for their entire company they live with the consequences.

Yes. If you think you don't have any SPoFs then I've got a handsome bridge for sale that may interest you.

However, choosing something like AWS is now looking like a more sensible choice. (Or even running one's own infrastructure.)

AWS goes down too

Why not?

Why are you even commenting? And it's Railway not raleway.

User since 2011 and you’re asking this question?

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