Almost any platform today is based on cloud servers, and the way these models work is to charge developers by user traffic. The more traffic, the more bandwidth, the more you have to pay. That’s not the only growing pain: with more users, you need more regulation (more admins or moderators), better guidelines, mission statements, and so on.

Some developers probably start thinking about growth as soon as they start a new platform, but I believe most independent developers don’t. Most developers probably focus primarily on their ideas and passions.

I’m noticing there’s no alternative to the “growth” plan. You start a service with 100 users, and it grows to 500, 1000, 10,000… and as it grows, you deal more with annoyances and less with what you really want to do. You either grow somehow (hire more people, ask for more money) or give up and start something new. These are the two options available: grow or gtfo.

What happens if a platform just doesn’t grow? What if a developer wakes up one morning and thinks, you know what, I don’t want to deal with having 10,000 more users, I think I’m good? Does such a thing exist anymore?

This reminds me of overeating. When you order food, there’s a certain meal size (which the restaurant decides for you), and this is what you’re supposed to eat even if the amount of food is twice what you need. But why? What happens if split your meal for today’s and tomorrow’s?

We can do that, but we need to think out of the box. Forgive me for comparing users to food again, I just think they both require the same mental effort. Do you know why chewing your food slowly can help you eat less? It’s because you give your body a chance to process what’s going on and talk back to your brain and tell it, “Hey, I think I’m good.” The ability to stop for a minute, look around, think of something else, and then consider if you still want more food (or users).

Perhaps I’m being naive here (I’m not a business person), but I believe that if you do want to grow after all you can always revisit the idea and do just that. Say you decided to close your platform after you reached 10,000 users, and after a couple of months you decide to grow again. Amazon or Digital Ocean or whoever will still be there, just as the people you’d need to hire. So what’s the big deal? Who’s chasing you?

Somewhere between moving everything to the cloud the idea of “enough” was left in the dust with other such ideas I love to grump about like the ownership of your data and other such relics.