TL;DR: Money, money, money. https://discord.gg/rG3s6Vz

I hate writing. I don’t even have any idea where to start with this, so I’m sorry if this reads like a fourth grader’s essay. Definitely not a “hang on the fridge” material. I write dumb bots and mediocre websites, not books. Let’s go though, and see what happens.

Mikuia was my first relatively big project, but I didn’t know it at the time. It was really kind of an uncharted territory to me, as I’ve barely started using Twitch and already wanted to make a bot for two cool streamers I met in my first days. It was December 2013, and even though I managed to rewrite the whole thing once already, there’s still a lot of ugly, unoptimized code that is somewhat incapable of handling tens of thousands of channels with millions of viewers in 2017. You can compare it to a wooden plane model made by a 12 year old. You can keep on duct taping it over the years, but you won’t win National Aeromodeling Championships with it. Probably. Feel free to prove me wrong.

Anyways, I was 17 years old at the time, and 20 now. Lots of things changed like finally moving out, university, and most importantly, adulthood (Kappa?). Pretty much entire thing has to be rewritten, and it’s no longer fun. Here are several explanations that you might or might not agree with, but should somewhat make sense. Take note, I’m omitting most of personal and family issues here, since you probably don’t care about me as a person anyways.

“If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.”

I used to love programming. I really did. Try doing it everyday in university classes though. Then come home and do course work. Then handle eventual projects or jobs you might have. Then try to code for fun. Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer spending whatever time I have left to regain my sanity; playing some games, watching shows, talking with friends. You know, just like a regular human being.

Overwhelming scale.

At the time of writing this, Mikuia is enabled on around 31,500 Twitch channels, ranging from about 200 live channels in the morning to about 700 in the evening. I don’t know how many of these are inactive, probably a lot but it’s beside the point. I can no longer “move fast and break things”. Every little issue quickly gets huge by the sheer amount of people. I can’t test in production, because some channel owners decided it’s a good idea to depend solely on some of Mikuia’s systems as the core of their streaming experience. Don’t get me wrong, I’m usually not trying to ruin anyone’s day on purpose, but the vision of so many people depending on me and the bad software I release always scared me. So now we’re left in a slight limbo, when most of the stuff works “somehow” and it’s better to not touch anything as it might crumble at any given moment. I didn’t expect so many people, and I still don’t understand how it happened; needless to say, the code wasn’t really ready for this.

Uncertain income.

From the start, I didn’t want to charge anyone for using the bot. I’ve always liked how cool it feels to provide something semi-useful to people, free of charge, and being able to sustain it with the help of donations or little paid improvements that aren’t really that important in the long run. No limits to the amount of commands, no blocking features behind a paywall. Open source. And obviously, less responsibility if something breaks. I don’t trust my software to work. If you’re doing anything in this field, you should probably be able to relate. If I coded airplane flight control systems, I would not only never fly a plane using them, I’d run away to another country. That’s probably why people’s experiences with my bot differ so much. Some people never had a single issue, while some weren’t able to use it for a single day without it turning upside down and pretending to be dead until predators walk away. I’ve tried many different solutions, PayPal forms on the website, GameWisp, and as of current, Patreon to help me with the server, domain, and other various utility costs, maybe even earn something on the side to buy myself a cute skin in Heroes of the League or Counter-Duty: Battle Offensive.

This is what happens every time, and it shouldn’t really be surprising. I make a huge deal out of money, I hate myself for it, some people throw random amounts of money at me without hesitation, some people get confused and shocked (“wtf this costs money?”), and some people get offended by me daring to say “money” out loud and go around insulting me. Sigh. Everything is fine for next few weeks or months, and then cycle continues. Oooh, and because we started talking about money, here’s the fun part everyone cares about. And care only about that one part.

Server costs.

You wanted transparency. I’ll give you transparency.

Kimsufi KS-4A (Core i7–920, 16 GB RAM, 2 TB HDD)

Main server hosting Mikuia and the website.

19.99 € + VAT = 24.59 € monthly

(Core i7–920, 16 GB RAM, 2 TB HDD) Main server hosting Mikuia and the website. € monthly Kimsufi KS-4B (Core i5–3570S, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD)

Secondary server hosting everything else I own, database backups, testing environments.

21.99 € + VAT = 27.05 € monthly

(Core i5–3570S, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD) Secondary server hosting everything else I own, database backups, testing environments. € monthly Mikuia.tv domain and Whois Privacy

$47.96 yearly = ~$4 monthly

monthly Mikuia.tv SSL certificate (CloudFlare)

$5 monthly

monthly Twitch Turbo

(maybe this one isn’t really needed, but the bot looks weird without that badge)

$8.99 monthly

I probably forgot something, but that’s the estimated price of stuff I use for the bot, excluding most of other stuff I pay for like other domains, food, Netflix (hey, I’m human too). Also, apparently my time is worthless. So I’m not going to even consider how many hours I’ve spent trying to “make the world a better place”. I’ll sum it up for you using 1 € to $1.09 conversion rate:

$74.46

Let’s look at Patreon again, shall we?

It dropped to $111.27 today at lowest, right? Can’t be that bad, right? Right?

February 2017: $253.33

March 2017: $198.12 (-22%)

April 2017: $167.69 (-16%)

May 2017: $111.27 (-34%)

Do you see the problem yet? Add Patreon and PayPal fees to the equation.

I don’t want to beg for money, I really don’t. I rather just throw the whole thing into trash than making it paid-only, or lock features. I don’t have a solution. I need your help to decide what to do. Here are few options I consider:

Very realistic:

- Drop the entire thing and forget it ever existed, live happily ever after. Go work at McDonald’s flipping burger patties.

Realistic:

- Get a stable source of income to pay for servers and servers ONLY until around the beginning of 2018, when Twitch deprecates APIs I’m using, and the bot is not updated accordingly. Then the bot dies.

Unrealistic:

- Get a stable source of income to pay for servers and some cool things other than that, like pizza! I’ll still try to find time to rewrite before 2018 (believe me or not, it’s not a lot of time).

Very unrealistic:

- Make a (kind of ) full time job out of this, work few hours daily in free time outside of university on improving everything and everyone wins (what a fantasy).

I kind of lost track where this post was going so… I guess the ball is in your court, Twitch community? Join the half-temporary Discord server to provide your opinion: https://discord.gg/rG3s6Vz. I’ll read everything you write there, even the immense hate because “yor levls aree no wokring”.

Oh Hatsu, just buy cheaper servers!

That doesn’t solve anything, my income sources are still on a downward trend, and you probably don’t know what you’re talking about anyways.

Oh Hatsu, I’ll give you a free server!

Yes, because accepting offers like these from random people on Internet is a great idea.

Oh Hatsu, you just suck at coding, I could do it better than you!

Go ahead, the whole thing is open-source. Yes, it sucks. Laugh as much as you want. If you’re truly that great, fix it yourself. http://github.com/Mikuia/Mikuia

Oh Hatsu, you should sell everything you own, stop paying for anything else, and keep the bot so we can get our dumb levels!

Do you also feed your pets but never pet or play with them, and expect them to like you?

Oh Hatsu, you can’t go away, we need levels!

Fuck yourself with a cactus.

And to the people who say they can run this on a $3 server: show me dedicated server offers with at least 16 GB of RAM, at least a quad-core CPU, and at least 1 TB of HDD space. Or change your fucking dealer.

Want to throw random amounts of money at me?

https://patreon.com/hatsu

https://twitch.tv/hatsuney (bits?)

https://twitch.streamlabs.com/hatsuney

Want to write an angry rant about how stupid I am?https://discord.gg/rG3s6Vz

https://www.reddit.com/r/osugame

https://www.tumblr.com

https://devnull-as-a-service.com

https://twitter.com/tedcruz