Rich asks:
Without revealing any financials or numbers from which financials could be derived, could you satisfy the geek curiosity in me and share a few details from 37 Signals apps? Number of customers, contacts, projects, milestones, files on S3, number of servers, logical infrastructure topology, etc.
Here are some rough numbers we can share:
Basecamp
- 2,000,000 people with accounts
- 1,340,000 projects
- 13,200,000 to-do items
- 9,200,000 messages
- 12,200,000 comments
- 5,500,000 time tracking entries
- 4,000,000 milestones
Highrise
- 3,500,000 contacts
- 1,200,000 notes/comments
- 575,000 tasks
Backpack
- Just under 1,000,000 pages
- 6,800,000 to-do items
- 1,500,000 notes
- 829,000 photos
- 370,000 files
Campfire
- 130,000 rooms
- 46,000,000 chat messages
- 200,000 files shared
Overall storage stats (Nov 2007)
- 5.9 terabytes of customer-uploaded files
- 888 GB files uploaded (900,000 requests)
- 2 TB files downloaded (8,500,000 requests)
Server stuff
We’re currently upgrading our server infrastructure to use significantly faster hardware along with the Xen virtualization software, so we’ll have fewer servers to manage. Our current server cluster contains around 30 machines, ranging from single processor file servers to 8 CPU application servers, for a total of around 100 CPUs and 200GB of RAM. Over the next couple of months, we plan to reduce the number of servers to 16 with around 92 CPU cores (each significantly faster than what we use today) and around 230 GB of combined RAM. Not only will our applications run faster, but our cluster will be much simpler to manage when we’re done.
Got a question for us?
Email svn at 37signals dot com and title the email “Ask 37signals”. Thanks!
phantomdata
on 21 Dec 07Awesome. Thanks to Rich for asking this and Jason/37s for being willing to share it!
Caleb Elston
on 21 Dec 07Thanks for sharing guys! Now that every product has metrics in the millions that is quite impressive. Do you remember when key stats first passed the 1 million mark?
Dustin Senos
on 21 Dec 07You know you’re a nerd when you smile reading bandwidth/cpu/ram stats.
Noah Everett
on 21 Dec 07Yes thank you for sharing this information. Very inspiring.
Chad
on 21 Dec 07::useless comment alert:: Cool!
Mark A. Richman
on 21 Dec 0737signals uses Amazon S3 for all its storage?
MI
on 21 Dec 07We use Amazon’s S3 for storage of files upload by users of our applications, yes. We’ve been using it for a little over a year and have been extremely happy with it.
steepest descent
on 21 Dec 07Paint me naive, but what would be the fallout of releasing financials. It seems your (37s) business model is always hawked as the future of software business, yet I still do not see the real value unless financials prove otherwise. 100 million eye balls and 10 million accounts doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll profit a dollar. There is a huge barrier in converting free to paying users.
Joe
on 21 Dec 07But Rails doesn’t scale!
Erik Dungan
on 21 Dec 07Descent, I disagree. I think its clear that 37s business model works and they are (mostly likely) making a profit. Besides, one of the benefits of being a private company is the ability to keep stuff to yourself.
In an era of Facebook and Digg valuations being based on nothing BUT eyeballs or potential ad revenue, I’d have to commend them for being this forthcoming.
Tony Wright
on 21 Dec 07Thanks for the numbers. Interesting stuff!
Why, oh why, do people talk about “users” or, in this case, “people with accounts”?
In this case, I guess it might be because it's a harmless number that won't allow people to derive your financial info.But in most cases, it galls me that sites tout their number of accounts like it has ANYTHING to do with their number of users.
What I want to know with most apps is: How many of users are using the app on a daily basis? Weekly basis? How much time do the users invest in an average day? How many visits do they make? What does attrition look like? Does it differ dramatically between free/pay accounts?
Stacy
on 21 Dec 07Thanks so much for sharing these stats.
If you had to choose, would you add three price points or reduce three price points, including the FREE price point too.
Dustin Senos
on 21 Dec 07Do you take advantage of any caching systems? memcached?
August Lilleaas
on 22 Dec 07How concerned are you about the stuff that some of the rails performance geeks worries about? Like, on a page with many links, do you use a href=”/link/to/#{params[:key]”>Edit /a, or <%= link_to “Edit”, foo_url %>? Not directly related, but: Do you use plugins for db query phatness, such as, say active_record_context? Or do you still go by find with :include?
It would be very interesting to get some technical details on this, from a rails developer perspecive. These kind of things is hot topics, and your apps are probably the most famous rails apps out there.
Dave Greiner
on 22 Dec 07Thanks for not only sharing these impressive numbers guys, but also for the other great content you’ve been pumping out all year long. Enjoy your well earned holidays.
MI
on 22 Dec 07Dustin: We make use of some memcached based caching, and are looking for additional places where it can be plugged in. It’s pretty impressive.
August: First of all, we’re very concerned about performance. That said, we use the URL helper methods rather than building the URLs by hand. As far as queries are concerned, we use the standard ActiveRecord built queries more often than not, but we also dig in and use find_by_sql when necessary for performance reasons. Typically we fix Rails itself when we find a performance issue rather than using plugins, at least when it’s generic enough to be applicable to other people.
We plan to do some more posts in the coming weeks and months that dig into technical details some more.
BradM
on 22 Dec 07So many questions in the comments. I’ll post it for you [again].
Got a question for us? Email svn at 37signals dot com and title the email “Ask 37signals”. Thanks!
This was a great article BTW. It seems that it would be just as useful for some to have a technical Ruby/Rails series of questions.
Angel
on 22 Dec 07Thanks for the numbers. 37signals is fascinating and a dream for many of us.
I have a different for you – How do we monetize our small to medium sized revenue generating internet companies? Would you offer up any of your thoughts in this area?
Thanks!
MB
on 22 Dec 07Great work 37,
But if you’re having that amount of data how are you handeling search then? Lucene / SOLR..
Thanks, i’m loving you’re story’s btw..
Some Dude
on 24 Dec 07Is it just me or is campfire a dud?
Niki
on 24 Dec 07Tyou for sharing this information
Serhei
on 24 Dec 07@Some Dude:
No, because a “chat room” could be used by anywhere between 4 and 25 (I think) people.
Steve
on 25 Dec 07@Tony,
Based on these numbers, there’s 1.5 projects per “person with account”. Assuming that an active users run several project, this suggests that the bulk of these people have 1 project, which probably means they’ve used it once just to kick the tires. Still, even if just 20% are active, this is impressive.
Al
on 25 Dec 07What web-server are you using? Apache/Lightppd/ngnix/Mongrel?
Anonymous Coward
on 25 Dec 07Enjoyed chewing on those numbers, thanks. Am really intrigued to learn about user churn and how many accounts have been active in the past month.
Aside, noticed on basecamphq.com ‘over 1MM signups’ instead of the current 2MM.
Osama
on 26 Dec 07Thanks for sharing such info, but I wonder of system requirements machines, CPUs and RAMs: how is this compared to the Java, PHP, or Python based projects? – I am talking about MVC frameworks – away from the development life cycle, of course.
how many machines, CPUs and RAMs would you use to serve the very same stuff? and having performance comparisons would be helpful.
Josh Walsh
on 26 Dec 07These numbers don’t mean anything out of context. The real overhead in this business is supporting free users, not supporting hardware.
I would be much more interested to hear stats comparing free accounts to paying accounts.
In general, I would assume a paying account contributes more content (projects, todo’s, milestones, etc….) than a free account does.
I would wager a guess that more than 2/3’rds of their accounts are non-paying accounts. I’m sure they are making good profits, but huge numbers don’t mean huge profits in a world where you give so much of your product away for free.
You provide a great product and I do not understand why you give so much of it away. I for one would love to see you limit your free accounts a little more to make a little more profit and then give your paying accounts more in return. IE, Time tracking on all paying accounts, or unlimited Highrise cases on paying accounts.
This discussion is closed.