What’s happening right now is a story we’ve seen plenty of times before. Overhead cost of convenience mixed with vendor lock-in, all while boasting about open source.
I’d love to create tools that were convenient and had fair pricing. The challenge is that you’re trying to grow into a market with worse acquisition economics. Tough to win if winning is the goal. If anyone has a solution reach out. XD
Our egress bill from Cloudfront last month, inc. the 1TB/per region free tier, was nearly $2,000. That's egress traffic ALONE (~20TB of it).
Needlessly to say, we're wrapping up testing on migrating our production (public) buckets to Cloudflare (R2) taking our cost from those $2,000 (and going up every month), to (drum roll)... $0,000/mo.
Have I mentioned AWS egress charges are borderline "extortionary"? :X
It should have no issue at all to align German wide but they never did it.
The Munich MVG for example is doing an experiment were you can pay by an app from some us company were you just start and stop your journey with a button and the app gives you the best price.
They could have instead just created some German wide software company sponsored by all the local public transport agencies and just do it themselves.
It's ridiculousl that modern problems are often not technical problems:-(
The issue is not the lack of technical expertise. The structure of the German public transport system is very localized, due to its historical growth. local networks are often owned by the municipalities that they are serving, the actual busses are sometimes provided by private companies on contract, the national railway carrier has contracts with state governments and certain local entities for specific services, national, state and local governments are subsidizing various services, etc.
I completely agree that it is a mess, but it is not really easy to solve with so many stakeholders and so many (sometimes conflicting but valid) different priorities at stake.
> They could have instead just created some German wide software company sponsored by all the local public transport agencies and just do it themselves.
But that already works with the »DB Navigator« app by Deutsche Bahn.
You can buy tickets for many local public transport companies. No need to download a custom app.
Because public transport is owned by the public (or publicly owned entities) in many places outside the US. In Europe, it is the norm, not the exception, as is the case in many other places that have some sort of socialism/social democratic history.
