The FIRST Alliance - A whole new way to play

[Dave Flowerday]

Originally Posted by GGCO

What features would The FIRST Alliance need for users to switch over?

I'll tell you what TBA has that you don't have yet: a proven record. What are your plans to keep this site going? How is it being paid for? Is it sustainable if it starts getting heavy use? There would be nothing more frustrating to me to develop a cool mobile app using your API and then have it disappear from underneath me because you get sick of paying the server bill or something. Or if you change the API in some way that breaks my app.

Originally Posted by GGCO

we've been getting 5,000 api hits per day

You've quoted that number a few times now. Let me give you an idea what you'll be up against if your service actually grows. The private FRC Spyder API server that we run (which provides similar data, obviously) receives 5,000 hits per minute during some events. We received 8 million hits during the 7 weeks of regionals. We can handle that kind of traffic with a modest server because we tightly control the client and make extensive use of HTTP headers to only send data when it's absolutely needed. Even then, it's a server instance that costs money. We used to run on a free App Engine instance, but we quickly outgrew that (especially after they changed their pricing model last fall).

Basically, what I would want to know is: how do you plan to survive? If you had all the traffic of FRC Spyder plus a few dozen other custom apps, and you have high school kids hitting your server who aren't respectful of the amount of traffic they're generating, how do you plan to handle it?

Although we don't use TBA for FRC Spyder, they've been around long enough to prove to me that they can deliver on their promises. Right now your service looks like a hobby project, and I would constantly have to wonder when you'd get bored of it and shut it down.