My Azure Files bill for a small 80 GB project share was kinda high. Around $30 per month. But the storage cost should be under $5. What's going on in here?
Azure's non-Premium storage tiers bill you for transactions (basically filesystem syscalls.) I was seeing 450 Create calls per a 5 minute period in Monitoring/Insights. On the Hot storage tier, that amounts to an extra $25 per month. But the load went away during night time. Around the time when I put my laptop to sleep.
Clearly the laptop was doing something. But what... Right. I had an open VSCode window for editing a project in a folder on the fileshare. Running a serve in a terminal too. Closed the VSCode window and the transactions per 5 minutes went to 0. That's a $25/month VSCode window. I guess it counts as SaaS.
Moral of the story? Billing for syscalls is a good business model.
It's now been a year since the Halloween party app started taking a life of its own and turned into a wellness app, keeping the bats along for the ride (and pumpkins too, for the first six months.) I've used it personally throughout the year and seen it evolve from a HIIT-centric workout app into an ambient couple-minutes-at-a-time exercise app, into a more complete mood improver and planned activity driver. There are still ways to go, so enjoy the ride.
Over the year, I've collected 105k coins, which translates to roughly 170 hours of exercise. That's half an hour of exercise a day, not bad for a bunch of bats!
And with the ring game distributing the effort over the day, it's been possible to do it even when the outside temps have been +37C. It's also kept many pains at bay by getting me moving before the mildly discomfortable sitting position turns into a painful locked up neck.
The weird thing is that I don't feel like I've done much exercise. In the good and the bad: the mood boost isn't as good as with a 15-min workout, or an one hour run, but the minutes rack up and you don't get the muscle pains and tiredness. I'd like to mix it up with workouts or runs or something, just for the extra mood boost.
Onwards to year two!
Where to next?
To improve the lives of as many people as possible, the BatWerk movement needs more people doing it and improvement in the quality of activities we're doing, exercise and otherwise.
This is the guiding equation: impact = userCount * userMinutesPerDay * qualityOfLifeImprovement(userMinutesPerDay)
My definition for the quality of life improvement is feeling healthy, not in pain, having a positive mental state, maintaining good relationships, getting my day-to-day tasks done, and achieving my long term goals.
To reach these ambitious goals, we need people who can get people doing the BatWerk routine. We need people who can increase the routine's quality of life improvement, and help users reach their optimal minutes per day. We need people who can get other people execute at the top of their game. Finally, we need people who can keep everyone paid and enable them to work on BatWerk in their fullest capacity.
Currently, the quality of life improvement from BatWerk is good on exercise minutes (let's say 80% on target with 30 min/day - I'd like to add some occasional intensity), mediocre on mood improvement (30% - the movement and messaging help, but it doesn't create a very solid mood), poor on driving goal-achieving action (20% - it drives initial action, but tends to lead to diluted effort and low-impact actions.) The challenge is habit-stacking these in a mutually reinforcing manner. If you add a badly-designed painful action driver after the exercise ring, it not only makes the action unlikely to happen, but makes you want to avoid doing the exercise as well.
In terms of user minutes per day, BatWerk is pretty much on target. There are ways to bring it up in a way that improves the quality of life metric, but it's good as it stands.
At this time, the most impactful way to increase BatWerk impact is increasing the user count by introducing more people to the activity and improving initial user retention. That will likely require a different packaging for the activity to make it a better identity fit, alongside a great effort to tell more people about the activity (and improving the design in a direction that makes people tell their friends about it too.)
Sustainability of the BatWerk movement is precarious. I'm working on it on my spare time, it has zero revenue, and based on my previous experience with monetizing websites and apps the revenue is unlikely to exceed $20 per year. That's twenty dollars, yes. To fix this dangerous situation, the priorities are to find a person who can create enough cashflow to sustain their work on BatWerk impact, and to increase the cashflow as a function of the impact to increase the size of a potential team. With the cashflow more secure and scalable, the priority shifts to hiring people who can increase the BatWerk impact, and building and improving the impact-generation machine.
