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3dicons: How a Billing Crisis Turned into a Revenue Boost

Sep 12, 2024

Two months ago, I noticed an issue with my Digital Ocean billing. I used to pay between $55 to $75, but suddenly the costs spiked—$116 one month and $162 the next. I asked for advice in the WIP community, and most suggested switching to Cloudflare R2, which offers free bandwidth, addressing the main reason my costs were rising on Digital Ocean. 3dicons currently only offers the option to download the entire 2GB+ file, even if users only need one icon, which led to around 10TB of monthly bandwidth usage.

I made the switch from Digital Ocean to Cloudflare for downloads and also added a direct link to Gumroad. Since Gumroad doesn't allow free downloads for files over 200MB, I set a $1 base price. Surprisingly, more people began using the Gumroad link, and my MRR jumped from -$75 to nearly $200. Some users have even been generous enough to contribute $5 or $10.

3dicons download

2 Month gumroad revenue

If you give people the easy option, they are generous enough to support.

Meanwhile, I'm still building v2 + pro with features like single download, online editing, and more. I hope to release it by the end of this year.

3dicons v2 WIP

Check out more about 3dicons

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-Steve Jobs

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