Per User Bandwith Costs for Evernote-Like Service

Question

I'm doing a project for my class at NYU and was trying to estimate bandwith costs. I want to hypothetically run a service like Evernote. So I'm trying to estimate bandwith costs for 2.5mm users. Can anyone give me some idea of how much it would cost or point out any resources that show how much bandwith the average Evernote user uses in a month? Are there any white papers on this?

Answer 1

I very much doubt there's going to be any whitepapers specifically on evernote-type services' per user bandwidth usage.

The best way to get a realistic estimate is by using basic research techniques and recruit a sample population to estimate with:

1. Put out ads around campus targeting Evernote users for a detailed local survey (8~20 users) and also recruit remote survey participants (the more the better) online.
2. Collect usage info from both groups (online participants can be surveyd using a web-based tool like Google Forms, SurveyMonkey, etc.) on their usage history/habits:
   • How long have they been using Evernote?
   • How many devices do they have Evernote installed on?
   • Do they use it for work/school/personal/social purposes? What specifically do they take notes for (grocery lists, lecture notes, creative writing, saving webpages, share images, etc.)?
   • How many notebooks do they have?
   • How many notes does each notebook contain?
   • How frequently do they create/edit/share notes?
   • And collect general demographic info (age, sex, location, ethnicity, income level, occupation, etc.) for segmentation.
3. Install traffic monitoring software on the local group's devices to record how many notes they are writing and how much bandwidth is used on all devices.
4. Use your segmentation data to extrapolate the bandwidth usage of your remote participants, and then use that to project the bandwidth usage for 2.5M users.