Our mission
dumbfunded is dedicated to making fun of things that a lot of people spend a lot of their lives building, but maybe they shouldn’t, you know?
Like all of the best startups, no one knows it exists, no one knows how it will ever make money, and it really only exists to spend that sweet VC money.
Our business fundamentals
dumbfunded will always be free of advertising, and is only supported by the kindness of companies that mysteriously like to do work for free (or nearly free).
dumbfunded’s current burn rate is $19.16 per month. At this rate, dumbfunded can remain in operation for 200 years.
Our generous sponsors
dumbfunded would be a huge pain in the ass to bring to you if not for the selfless efforts of a number of companies that have generously decided to turn their VC money into free (or nearly free) services.
GitHub
Hosts the git repository the site lives in. While the repo had to be public to keep the cost at $0, who cares.
NS1
Hosts authoritative DNS for dumbfunded.io. No charge.
Hugo
Open source static site generator that builds this here website. Costs nothing, naturally.
AWS
dumbfunded stores its original images in S3.
Average monthly cost: $0.08 (the credit card processing fee is higher than this!)
imgix
Prepares and delivers images from S3 to you.
Average monthly cost: a whopping $3.08!
Netlify
Churns the site milk into site butter with Hugo and then delivers it to your doorstep.
Average monthly cost: an astonishing $9.00!
nic.io
Domain registry for the .io TLD and the
place to go to buy domains with very similar names to dumbfunded.io.
Average monthly cost: $7.00! Yep, the domain itself accounts for half of dumbfunded’s budget.
Gracious host of the dumbfunded Twitter feed, helping to bring links to all the people of the world. Twitter, of course, is famous for having no discernable business model and thus is free.
Google Analytics
Collects the data that says anyone reads this thing. Costs nothing, but we all know what Google is getting out of it.
Let’s Encrypt
Provides the SSL certificate for dumbfunded.io. Gratis.
Our esteemed sponsor alumni
dumbfunded misses our dear former sponsors, and looks forward to writing about the inevitable ends of their businesses.
Tumblr
Used to host the site before Hugo and GitHub and Netlify came along. Everything is served from the US East Coast with no CDN, it doesn’t support SSL on custom domains, and nobody cares about it’s alleged social networking aspects.
Tumblr also has some exciting ideas about scraping referrer data from links and jamming a ton of crud into your pages. They also have no business model, and thus it is totally free.
CloudFlare
Formerly handled DNS for dumbfunded.io, and was the CDN for image content. Mysteriously
this was free.