Building in public hurts sometimes but maybe this helps someone else.
Spent 18 months building decentralized social media app. Raised $400K from angels. Had 50K users. Things were growing. Felt like we were gonna make it.
AWS bill hit $47,000 last month. For STORAGE. Not computing not bandwidth just storing user data. Our entire runway getting eaten by Amazon.
Tried to raise more capital. Investors asked about unit economics. Showed them AWS bills scaling linearly with users. They all passed. "Not sustainable" they said.
Had to shut down yesterday. Laid off entire team. $400K and 18 months gone because storage costs killed us.
You know what's fucked up? @walrusprotocol exists. $WAL on Sui provides decentralized storage CHEAPER than AWS. I knew about it. Chose AWS anyway because "easier to start with what I know."
That decision killed my company.
Walrus erasure coding is more efficient than traditional cloud. No corporate profit margins inflating every gigabyte. Just distributed network operating at actual cost.
Our AWS bill would have been maybe $8-12K on Walrus. Completely sustainable. Investors would have funded us. We'd still be alive.
Instead I'm writing this from my parents house after shutting down and disappointing everyone who believed in me.
If you're building web3 app and using centralized storage you're making same mistake I did. AWS will price you out eventually. Scales exponentially with growth.
@Walrus 🦭/acc solves this. Real decentralization. Lower costs. Built for applications that actually scale.
I learned the $400K lesson. Don't repeat my mistake. Use proper infrastructure from day one not after it's too late.
$WAL is what I should have built on. Maybe my startup would still exist. Now I'll never know.
Learn from my failure. Build right from start.
