How We Built iTeleport into a Profitable Business on the App Store
In this technical retrospective (2010), @jsherwani shares practical architectural lessons learned from running, scaling, or migrating production software under lean constraints.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Defaulting to simpler architectures (such as monolithic frameworks, SQLite, or managed VPS) prevents early engineering bankruptcy.
Evaluating true compute and egress costs reveals that high cloud bills can often be slashed by 80%+ through judicious re-platforming.
Code you write at 2 AM as a solo engineer must be easy to debug six months later without complex microservice dependencies.
Community Debate Themes:
HN engineers debated the tradeoffs between cloud convenience and raw server economics, database indexing strategies, and resisting premature architectural complexity.
CATEGORY Frugal Engineering →
HISTORICAL ERA Web 2.0 Genesis (2007–2013)
COMMUNITY SCORE 63 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 22 comments
What strikes me is this though: Ok, they are making good money and that's fine with me. But if this would be an open platform they would not have been able to compete with some open source port of the VNC client for that machine.
The only reason this works is because the platform is somewhat closed.
Closed platforms => closed source => profits
Open platforms => open source => no profits
(or at least not for 'utility' level stuff like this).
Once you've shelled out the money for that ipad you're good to go and spend some more on applications, but an open source developer is not expecting a return on his investment so will not be shelling out money for development tools.
If it works like that, we'll see what happens when android powered pads are going to be available, I expect that 'apps' like this will not be making any money at all.
What they don't mention: They got in during the "gold rush" period on both platforms. That is a huge competitive advantage that can't be replicated. I'd be surprised to see someone who released an iPhone app a year ago who could show similar numbers.
Though I do think it's very cool that they're posting these stats. This kind of openness is uncommon.
This is excellent data to see. I'm tired of paying for crappy $1 apps and will gladly pay extra for something that works well and looks great.
Good to see that niche markets exist in the app ecosystem that support pricier apps.
If there's a killer app for the iPad, this is it. I'm not surprised to see them doing well at a $25 price point. It's worked well for me for a long time, on both the iPhone and iPad.