It's complex. Just asking things like "how many physical servers" is nonconstructive, same with bandwidth. People get caught up focused on "website hosting" like it's an HOA site and can't see forest through the trees.
Everyone needs to understand with background information.
Airplanes.Live would be fine with the current ADSBx usage, it would be better off because we could fund it with ads. Eyes = ad revenue. In fact, with 10,000 feeders, Airplanes.Live would completely dominate and we could easily "steal" most ADSBexchange customers. Instead of millions a year in cash going to a private equity firm - we could invest substantially back into community, fund hardware builds, and pay full time developers to improve the software and decoders. Imagine what could be done when greed is not the primary motivation!
ADSBexchange, prior to GHO (Greg and Ryan), was collapsing at about 1000 feeds. I ran it all for years. Day to day dev ops, data sales, the whole thing. Dan was working for a biotech firm and WeWork. The original site used VRS spread across hundreds of VMs. I converted the VMs to Linux and was able to stabilize it for about 18 months. Eventually VRS couldn't handle tracking more than 10,000 about planes - the code just wasn't up to (.NET and hobbyist).
In 2019 (maybe late 2018) I met Greg. His intellectual property became ADSBx. GHO made it scale. GHO made the infrastructure something I didn't have to worry about, we could grow feeders and the business side. I don't want to say what the agreement and plan was, because of the lawsuits - it wasn't selling out to a PE firm. GHO had a rock solid contract with ADSBexchange. As mentioned in the lawsuit, Dan knew this and tried to change it something like 20 places and get them re-sign it. See the lawsuit.
ADSBExchange was hosted by GHO, Greg and Ryan, for a few thousand a month. Dan was making, $1,000- $4,000 thousand dollars per day in ads. Per day! Commercial data sales took off, made close to $1M in cash in 2022. $1 million dollars - most of which Dan pocketed. The subscription was just to get more feeders, we found that most people will react better to having something taken from them, and then you give it back if they do something for it - aka feed or give money. The subscription thing was opposed by most of us but Dan saw dollar signs, it probably pulls in 100K a year - likely more now.
ADSBExchange grew faster and made more money in 2 years once off of VRS than anyone expected. GHO launched the platform in 2020 for us - Dan started selling process in September 2022. Dan turned into a total scumbag - as is detailed in the civil lawsuit.
I couldn't get Dan to invest in paying for a mobile app, or really anything.
We did SDR hardware because FlightAware, after the Raytheon buyout, raised prices and made SDR very hard to get. Because in part, they probably noticed we were using them in bulk.
What costs money is the data storage and the man hours. The redundancy and SLA support. The effort. The social media. The commercial support. The data support. Everything you don't see that goes into an operations. The dev ops of the infra.
There are expenses, but those are mostly talent, hardware, mobile developers, etc. ADSBexchange didn't have most of those expenses, so there are no excuses for Dan Streufert.
Airplanes.Live can be the positive force that we all wanted ADSBx to be. I'm not kidding when I say we want Aiplanes.Live to be sustainable and donate six figures+ a year to radio clubs and STEM programs. Long term goal would be a non-profit or some form of non-profit type organization. Very long term, we'd like to build enough capital for an endowment then turn the organization over to a board of directors with an accountable mission they have to follow.
The above items and lack of one person controlling everything is why those site owners that showed up, even the one we initially promoted, attacked us so hard in the last 12 months. The crypto scams, et all. They all see the $$$$. They see that can scrape some $ from the community with pretty words while retaining sole ownership to benefit themselves.
It seems people would prefer being abused and taken advantage of while the sites they feed laugh all the way to bank while giving them fake "enterprise" accounts or a goofy dashboard. I don't understand the mentality.
Add a feed, help us grow, join us and the team that built the things in doing it right.
https://airplanes.live/get-started/
We don't have dreams of just a hobby site. We have dreams of something much more with a hobby site community feel.
Yes, there are expenses coming, we need hardware for a data center colo, we need petabytes of storage, we need RAM and CPU dedicated. Those expense are not the things we need to worry about as much as people do. Coverage = success. Providing an alternative before the private equity firm full guts the carcass or sells it to someone who shuts it down - that is the focus.
Once we're a non-profit - everyone will see our books, expenses, payroll, etc.
PS: forgive the typos
Edit: How do we get people to understand above? Private equity is NOT your friend. Private equity is a cancer.
