Bootstrapping a Million dollar PHP SaaS business for a buck a month (per customer)

Grokability makes Snipe-IT, a web-based, open source, asset management product written in PHP. Users can install it themselves, of course - but they can also pay us to host it for them.

We try to make it a rule to never mess up the open-source app just to help our business. The version we host is the exact same as the one you can download from Github. The license (AGPL) even requires that! That app is single tenant - so every new customer is another full installation of the software.

We've figured out, over years, how to do this extremely efficiently, across 8 different regions in AWS. We've been able to do this without complex container systems like Kubernetes. Our ARR (Annual Run Rate) is nearly 1.25 Million dollars, and our AWS bill is only around $3400/month. We've never taken money and have always been profitable.

This talk will go over how our systems worked when we started out, how our systems changed and the problems we ran into, and how we operate now.

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