It’s a real amateur hour on the tech side. Anything we say about what is costing them so much is pure speculation really without much insight into their architecture. I would expect live streaming 9 video feeds to 60k viewers (I think Sam said that was their viewer count at one point) to be fucking expensive but there’s a high chance there are ways they’re being absolutely retarded too.
If I were them I would start at the bill breakdown and figure out which services are the biggest cost centers. There’s probably one thing dominating the bill, and if it’s not the bandwidth then they’re lucky in a way because they would have plenty of low hanging fruit for cost savings. But also unlucky because it was built in a retarded way in the first place.
There are several suggestions in this thread which would help for sure but they’re mostly way too complicated to build. They’re in an ongoing emergency. There is no way they can implement new optimizations, even if they would be simple in normal circumstances. Again, if it’s not a bandwidth issue the best thing they can do immediately is to disable all the expensive features until costs are manageable and get the show on the road. Sam should have warned his bank about large sudden charges, but sounds like they had no idea how expensive it would be or how to estimate costs anyway.
I want to see the rest of the 6 weeks play out, so I hope they pull through. But thank god I’m not in their shoes right now because it’s def not a fun time.