It has been a few days since our relaunch, and it has been great seeing so many familiar users and meeting new ones! I wanted to make a post explaining some operational details and what the future holds for QueUp.  

Firstly, who is now behind QueUp? 

There have been a few changes to the team that maintains QueUp since we closed in 2019. At the time of writing, both Larry and I are the only people working on QueUp. While our roles on the site remain as Admins, we are also the Co-Owners of the site. We are incredibly thankful for the previously involved people in the site’s development and growth, and we remain committed to taking this project to the next level. 

Hosting costs 

It should come as no surprise that running this site costs money, and it is probably a lot more than you would think. One of the biggest reasons why we closed in the first place was that we could not afford our hosting costs. To give a ballpark figure, we were spending close to $2000 a month on servers and 3rd party software, which honestly was not sustainable given that the site was entirely funded out of pocket.  

In a way, our closure was a good thing for us as it has allowed us to fully reset and start again when it comes to building out our infrastructure. Whereas before, we were working to reduce costs, we are now in a position where, in theory, our operating costs should scale as we grow. More predictable pricing is much more desirable and alleviates a lot of stress! 

In the future, we will have to consider options to open up revenue streams that allow us to invest in growing, further developing the site, and, more importantly, keeping the lights on. We are not sure how this will look, though we will keep you updated as we explore our options further. 

As part of our commitment to being transparent, we would like to share our operating costs because, as mentioned above, this was a massive part of the reason why we closed in the first place.  

Item	Cost / Month
Server Provider	$162.50
Cloudflare	$30.00
Sendgrid E-Mail Provider	$15.00
Blog Hosting	$5.00
Image Storage	$5.00
Microsoft 365	$12.00

Total: $232.00/month*

*The total may fluctuate each month due to some services being usage-based.

We are back for good, but what about the future? 

Redevelopment 

Some of you may remember that we were working on redeveloping the whole site as our current code is getting old, and it is incredibly prohibitive when it comes to adding new features and resolving bugs. Redevelopment of QueUp will remain our biggest priority from now on as this will allow us to continue to grow and add many community suggested features.  

After many discussions, we have agreed that the best way to approach our goal is to rewrite one component at a time instead of our previous approach, where we started to redevelop everything at once. We realized this was not an efficient use of our time and we all felt burned out, and motivation levels were at an all-time low.  

Our first goal will be redeveloping the front-end from scratch (the website/what you see). We still need to do a lot of research into this, though we thought it would be best to keep you in the loop regarding what we are doing. 

You may be asking what this means for the current QueUp website. Simply put, we will not be adding any new features, and we will only be fixing bugs that impact the core functionality of the site. The technology that powers the site is ancient, and it is no longer viable to try and work with it. Also, not to mention that as a team of 2, we do not have the resources to do anything else, so I hope you can appreciate our stance.  

Transparency 

At the time that we decided to close the site, we left you in the dark. We failed to communicate that we could not continue running QueUp until after we had taken the site offline. We are deeply sorry for this, and we understand that this may have broken your trust in us. Over the years, we have recognized your appreciation for our openness and honesty about our operation. Moving forward, we will do better to keep you informed of what we are doing and share updates when we can. We believe that it is only right that we keep you fully informed. 

We plan on using all our social channels to communicate with our users, so now is a good time to plug our social media. Make sure you are following us wherever we are: 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/QueUpNet  

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/QueUpNet  

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/queupapp/  

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/QueUp/  

Discord: https://discord.gg/r7UEdpF  

I hope this post has been able to shed some light as to what we are going to be up to in the future; however, should you have any questions or concerns, please reach out at support@queup.net. 

Let us see what the future holds, and we hope you stick around to see where it leads us.