thekhatribharat

At $450/month, that's the same hourly rate as India's Urban Company / Snabbit / Pronto instant help. So it's price-competitive even in India.

How does one estimate the number of ACUs required to finish a task?

Can you share the coding questions it failed on?

xAI is a separate entity, and not a X/Twitter subsidiary.

1. They mention that the largest tables ran into several TBs, and they would have soon topped the max IOPS supported by RDS. RDS for PostgreSQL peaks at 256,000 IOPS for a 64 TB volume. For a multi-AZ setup, this costs ~$70K/mo.

2. Let's assume the final outcome was a 5-way shard with each shard supporting ~50,000 IOPS and ~12 TB data. For a multi-AZ setup, this costs ~$100K/mo.

3. It took 9 months to shard their first table. Since it required application changes as well, let's assume this was 9mo * 20 work days/mo * (3 DB engineers + 2 app engineers) = 900 work days. Even at $100K avg. annual pay for an engineer, this is ~$400K.

4. A PostgreSQL-compatible NewSQL like YugabyteDB should cost ~$15K/mo to match top-of-the-line RDS performance. So Figma spent ~25x ($400K/$15K) to implement horizontal sharding in-house, and is still on RDS which costs ~6x ($100K/$15K)

me too :)

Before taking any of the steps you will have to finalise the approach i.e whether you are looking for a longer term solution or a shorter term solution.

Most of the startups start with short term plan i.e hire folks as consultants with US registered entity. And then as per the long term roadmap, hire a site lead who can start the process of registering india entity and setup all the payroll and other stuff. After a certain number of people things like PF and all become necessary. There are a few consultancy firms who handle all of these things.

Consultant approach works well for initial hires. Also, the india entity registration process takes atleast 3 months, so in the starting most of the firms start with consultants.