💰 Meteor products that make money

acemtp · May 4, 2020, 9:22am

Hello,

I think it would be awesome to have more transparency with a list of project made with Meteor that make money and how much.

It could be a nice way to show that Meteor is not just for “prototyping” (number one fake news) but that you can make real money with Meteor. It doesn’t matter if you earn $100/month or $1M/month. Please share!

I’ll start, hoping some people will follow!

Talkus (released in 2016, closed in 2018): We’ve growth it to max $7 000/month. Switched to another project.
lempod: $30 000/month in April 2020 (still growing).
lemlist: $80 000/month in April 2020 (still growing).

All those projects are 100% Meteor vanilla (Blaze, mongo, DDP) from France

It would have been impossible to do all those projects, with 2 developers, so quickly without Meteor.

vikr00001 · May 4, 2020, 4:34pm

That is awesome. Congratulations! I’d like to know more about these products. Could you please post the links?

smeijer · May 4, 2020, 5:05pm

so quickly without Meteor.

Can you tell me more about your stack? “Meteor” isn’t “just Meteor” anymore. What other meteor packges or node modules are you using? View layer, database, meteor methods / subscriptions or graphql?

How do you deal with traffic / scaling?

acemtp · May 4, 2020, 5:58pm

I didn’t want to make this post to promote my product. Anyway, it’s lempod.com lempod.com and lemtalk.com

acemtp · May 4, 2020, 6:03pm

As I said, it’s pretty Meteor old school, mongodb, ddp (pub/sub/call), blaze.
No graphql, no apollo, no react, no angular, no import.

I really loved (and still love) the original vision of Meteor and never moved to the new Meteor spirit.

Here is the meteor list for lemlist.com our main project:

accounts-base                       1.6.0  A user account system
accounts-google                     1.3.3  Login service for Google accounts
accounts-oauth                      1.2.0  Common code for OAuth-based login services
accounts-password                   1.6.0  Password support for accounts
accounts-ui                         1.3.1  Simple templates to add login widgets to an app
andruschka:jquery-ui-sortable       1.11.2  Sortable is a jQuery UI behaviour for interactively drag-reordering table rows.
blaze-html-templates                1.1.2  Compile HTML templates into reactive UI with Meteor Blaze
bozhao:link-accounts                2.1.1  Meteor external service link system
browser-policy                      1.1.0  Configure security policies enforced by the browser
check                               1.3.1  Check whether a value matches a pattern
dburles:mongo-collection-instances  0.3.5  Access your Mongo instances
ecmascript                          0.14.3  Compiler plugin that supports ES2015+ in all .js files
es5-shim                            4.8.0  Shims and polyfills to improve ECMAScript 5 support
facts-base                          1.0.1  Publish internal app statistics
facts-ui                            1.0.0  Display internal app statistics
fourseven:scss                      4.12.0  Style with attitude. Sass and SCSS support for Meteor.js.
google-config-ui                    1.0.1  Blaze configuration templates for Google OAuth.
http                                1.4.2  Make HTTP calls to remote servers
illusionfield:blaze-layout          2.3.1  Layout Manager for Blaze (works well with FlowRouter)
jparker:crypto-aes                  0.1.0  AES Package for CryptoJS, standard secure algorithms
jparker:crypto-md5                  0.1.1  MD5 algorithm for CryptoJS, standard secure algorithms
kadira:flow-router                  2.12.1  Carefully Designed Client Side Router for Meteor
lempire                             0.0.19+ boilerplate for lempire projects
meteor-base                         1.4.0  Packages that every Meteor app needs
meteorhacks:picker                  1.0.3  Server Side Router for Meteor
meteortesting:mocha                 2.0.0  Run Meteor package or app tests with Mocha
mikowals:batch-insert               1.1.9* Insert multiple documents to mongo collection with one db call.
mobile-experience                   1.1.0  Packages for a great mobile user experience
momentjs:moment                     2.24.0* Moment.js (official): parse, validate, manipulate, and display dates - official Meteor packaging
mongo                               1.10.0  Adaptor for using MongoDB and Minimongo over DDP
oauth                               1.3.0  Common code for OAuth-based services
oauth2                              1.3.0  Common code for OAuth2-based login services
ostrio:base64                       2.0.2* Efficient isomorphic Base64 implementation, with support of WebWorkers, Native code and Unicode
ostrio:files                        1.14.1* Upload files to Meteor application, with 3rd party storage support: AWS:S3, GridFS and other
random                              1.2.0  Random number generator and utilities
reactive-var                        1.0.11  Reactive variable
service-configuration               1.0.11  Manage the configuration for third-party services
session                             1.2.0  Session variable
shell-server                        0.5.0  Server-side component of the `meteor shell` command.
standard-minifier-css               1.6.0  Standard css minifier used with Meteor apps by default.
tracker                             1.2.0  Dependency tracker to allow reactive callbacks
underscore                          1.0.10  Collection of small helpers: _.map, _.each, ...
underscorestring:underscore.string  3.3.4  underscore.string (official): String manipulation extensions for Underscore.js javascript library.
zodern:hide-production-sourcemaps   1.1.0  Hide sourcemaps in production
zodern:standard-minifier-js         4.0.0-beta.2* Javascript minifier that creates production sourcemap

and the npm package.json:

"@babel/runtime": "7.8.4",
"@microsoft/microsoft-graph-client": "^2.0.0",
"@okgrow/auto-analytics": "2.0.0",
"adal-node": "^0.2.1",
"aircall-everywhere": "1.5.0",
"bcrypt": "3.0.6",
"body-parser": "1.19.0",
"chart.js": "^2.9.3",
"color-scheme-change": "1.0.1",
"customerio-node": "0.6.0",
"emailjs-imap-client": "3.0.7",
"fabric": "3.0.0",
"fibers": "4.0.1",
"file-type": "12.4.0",
"fontfaceobserver": "2.1.0",
"google-libphonenumber": "3.2.6",
"googleapis": "40.0.0",
"html-to-text": "5.1.1",
"hubspot": "2.3.5",
"isomorphic-fetch": "^2.2.1",
"jquery-ui-sortable": "^1.0.0",
"jsforce": "1.9.3",
"jwt-decode": "^2.2.0",
"liquidjs": "8.2.3",
"luxon": "1.15.0",
"mailparser": "2.7.1",
"meteor-node-stubs": "0.4.1",
"mongodb": "3.2.7",
"multer": "1.4.1",
"node-cron": "2.0.3",
"node-dogstatsd": "0.0.7",
"nodemailer": "6.2.1",
"octobat-npm": "2.0.1",
"papaparse": "5.0.0",
"perfect-scrollbar": "1.4.0",
"pixi.js": "5.0.3",
"puppeteer": "2.0.0",
"read-chunk": "3.2.0",
"request": "2.88.0",
"stripe": "7.5.2",
"timezones.json": "1.5.0",
"txtgen": "2.2.2",
"underscore": "1.9.1",
"tough-cookie": "^3.0.1"

Nothing fancy as you can see

alawi · May 4, 2020, 6:06pm

Nothing fancy except the bravery to ignore the tech hype and FUD while building products that sell to satisfied customers using tech that gets the job done.

Congrats on your products

stolinski · May 4, 2020, 8:55pm

LevelUpTutorials has been profitable and built on Meteor for a long time now.

sabativi · May 4, 2020, 9:46pm

Interesting I did not know that this package exists, but cannot find any docs on it, what do you use it for ?

Volodymyr · May 4, 2020, 11:02pm

So you are still on Meteor 1.6.0 and feel happy? No feeling of ‘something is missing’?

illustreets · May 4, 2020, 11:05pm

illustreets is location intelligence software for the enterprise. At the moment we have enough revenue to pay the bills and salaries, though the plan is to obviously grow. Working with clients such as World Bank, and just last month landed our first NASDAQ-100 client. Sorry, the numbers and some client names are business sensitive details.

Built with what is being referred to as “vanilla” Meteor (currently on 1.10.2). Pub/sub is actually essential for our user experience, so not moving away from that any time soon. The big data infrastructure to which Meteor connects relies on heavyweights such as PostgreSQL + PostGIS. However, we still prefer MongoDB for user and real-time data.

mullojo · May 4, 2020, 11:09pm

This was a fun story I remember reading about a Meteor app building journey too:

illustreets · May 4, 2020, 11:19pm

What a great story! Also, gotta admire the guy’s business sense.

veered · May 4, 2020, 11:57pm

Qualia!

Here’s our Series C announcement from last year:

acemtp · May 5, 2020, 6:30am

@alawi: thank you

@veered and @stolinski: don’t want to share numbers?

@sabativi: it’s not well documented indeed. You can find a few info at the bottom of this page. It basically display some real time stats about oplog/pub/sub performance. Example:

@Volodymyr: We use the latest Meteor 1.10.2. We just don’t use all the “new” things. I just feel productive and working way faster than everybody else ^^.

diaconutheodor · May 5, 2020, 6:39am

The success doesn’t really lie in the framework, it lies in the developers AND the business team, in how it got marketed. Does Meteor old-school help you code faster than new-school with GraphQL & React ? My answer would be no. It really doesn’t. I find that typescript and type safety in general lets you code much faster and error-free and I found React (with hooks) to be much easier to work with than Blaze templates from so many perspectives.

afrokick · May 5, 2020, 7:01am

We have online school for kids(8-16yo) on Meteor. It is one of the largest online school in Russian.

I agree with @diaconutheodor The good team + proper instruments are the main part of project’s success.

sacha · May 5, 2020, 7:42am

I agree but I suppose it’s nice to show positive examples of Meteor in use. Although I would be curious to also hear about use cases where using Meteor prevented the business from being successful.

Speaking from personal experience, I’ve had to deal with my fair share of server issues over the years and I could see how having your site go down unexpectedly from a CPU spike could hurt your profits… But that’s probably a topic best left for another thread.

Volodymyr · May 5, 2020, 10:11am

@sacha you could name your thread ‘Meteor failures and workarounds’, it would be useful. And everyone would be able to suggest whether the issue could be prevented or not. And whether it was solved in the next versions of Meteor/or could be solved in the future.

illustreets · May 5, 2020, 11:38am

Couldn’t agree more. However…

I would argue that the stability of the framework and backwards compatibility does have a lot to do with it, particularly if your team is small. Imagine having to rework your product(s) to a considerable extent, while your are still growing, because the newest version is incompatible with your code base. Meanwhile, you have to put aside features which have been at the top of your clients’ wish list.

The answer to this question makes more economic sense for a software house, whose entire business model is quite different from that of a SaaS. In that case, I think you are right, but in this thread I think the discussion is revolving around the SaaS model

alawi · May 5, 2020, 11:51am

I agree with this, I think if you’ve a SaaS idea with clear scope then Meteor, DDP, Blaze, and Galaxy are probably still the fastest and the most economical and accessible way to get the idea out to the market (without outsourcing your server or database). I use React but one only becomes productive when they start to master the ecosystem that comes with it (at least that was my experience…).