- cross-posted to:
- support@beehaw.org
- support@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- support@beehaw.org
- support@beehaw.org
our June 2023 financial update.
obligatory preface: we’re 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us.
because of the unique circumstances of this month i won’t report an expected yearly expense like i did last time. that’ll probably come next month, when our finances are closer to a useful baseline.
overall expenses this month: $566.98
this is a mighty looking expense, but only $371.98 of it is infrastructure (and even less of that is actually site hosting).
$312.54 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into
- $241.47 for hosting the site itself
- $48.29 for backups
- $11.87 for site snapshots
- $10.91 for bandwidth overage (1091.10GB @ $0.01/GB)
$15.28 for Hive, an internal chat platform we’re trying to set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean, but distinct enough to break out from overall DO hosting)
- $13.89 for hosting Hive
- $1.39 for backups
~$39.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into
- $35/mo for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam)
- ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)
$5/mo for 1TB of backup storage with BackBlaze (redundant backup system that’s standalone from Digital Ocean)
the remaining $195 of this month’s expenses have gone to paying @UrLogicFails@beehaw.org for his community icons. we do so at a rate of $5 per icon and he’s done 39 of them for us (36 of which are live so far).
overall: we definitely think we’re able to downsize infrastructure costs going forward. we’re already investigating how best to do that (both in terms of host and overall cost)–there’s no ETA for a few reasons, but this month should not be representative of many more subsequent months.
overall contributions this month: $3,870.44
we also have an incredible amount of support, so that really helps things as far as “being able to take time to get everything right”. according to OpenCollective, we currently have approximately:
- 97 monthly contributions, totaling $549.58
- 9 yearly contributions, totaling $254.99
- 149 one-time donations, totaling $3,065.87
between monthly and yearly contributions, this means we are still more-or-less breaking even and sustainable overall with this month’s costs. obviously, we would like to be substantially moreso though, through either lower costs, more donations, or a combination of both.
total end of month balance: $3,591.33
- yes yes, this is already out of date by a bunch. expect it to be like that, i use UTC for our reports lol.
expense runway, assuming no further donations
- assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about 6 months and 10 days of runway
- assuming just expenses like our infrastructure this month: we have 10 and a half months of runway
if you’d like to make the runway longer (and reward us for even having this site up today after yesterday’s complete fiasco), now is a good time to donate :)
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Just want to say I appreciate the transparency. Keep up the good work!
Truly appreciate you making this information public. I think it underscores the feeling of community and the idea that we’re all in this together, to see these numbers and be able to contribute to them. I’ve never used a site that includes its people in these discussions, and i have to say as a non techy person this budget is not as intimidating as I’d thought it would be. This feels….sustainable? Collective? And very positive. Thank you all who worked on this in any capacity.
I didn’t know this kind of transparency existed before today. Thank you for everything you do!
Wow, I never thought I’d see this level of transparency! Thanks for sharing all this info!
Nice to see you guys have some reserves too. It is a little bit of a crazy time knowing what ongoing costs will be so reserves can be really helpful.
Glad y’all aren’t in the red. Appreciate the work.
Love the transparency, I set up my monthy contribution already, glad to pay for this, wouldn’t pay a cent to corporate re**it.
Thank you for your hard work, and thanks to the donators for making this possible!
Apologies if this has been asked elsewhere, I haven’t seen it: How are the core team compensated for their work on the platform? I appreciate that it’s a passion project, but I’m sure y’all have bills to pay.
Apologies if this has been asked elsewhere, I haven’t seen it: How are the core team compensated for their work on the platform?
short answer: we aren’t.
long answer: we extremely aren’t. the person who has financially benefited the most from running the site is the person who makes our icons, because we try to pay a fair wage to people whose labor we use that isn’t our own. the site quite literally would not be able to function if we were compensated for doing this–on our end-of-month balance we’d fund about a week of work total between all of us, assuming the quite-low-by-software-standards $15/hr wage.
I appreciate that it’s a passion project, but I’m sure y’all have bills to pay.
can’t speak for the other mods but i currently benefit from not having a job and not technically having bills to pay. i assume the others have jobs which cover their expenses but as you can probably infer this means we can’t do this as a full time job which makes it vital it doesn’t become one
When can I buy Beehaw merch? I want a polo shirt with a tiny Beehaw logo embroidered on the top left.
We’ve discussed this in the past, and it’s something we’re open to the idea of, but we’d like for the merch to be sustainable and to provide resources for people that need it, rather than large companies. If someone on this website happens to run a small business making some kind of merchandise and can handle the volume they’d likely see, we’re more than open to working with them, but it’s way down low in terms of priorities.
There is unfortunately no Merch 😓
Maybe later but this is pretty hard to do and we’re spread way too thin to do more at the moment.
I suppose they might be able to have them made themselves locally. Using files or something. Just an idea.
Curious, what are the specs of the DO VM?
other admins can fill in with more specifics but just based on the dashboard:
16 vCPUs / 32GB / 160GB Disk
Thanks for sharing. That’s tiny compared to the VMs we use at work. I’m always impressed how much more efficient grassroots setups are compared to bloated corporate ones.
Have you considered using the DO managed database products to improve scalability?
That’s quite a considerable amount of firepower. It’s amazing how much computer grunt is used for the task of “moving text”.
To be fair, that is so beefy to helping weather the Reddit influx we suspect, and based on metrics before tuning Lemmy and related services. As of now, with all the improvements we’ve made, that level of hardware gives us like 50% room for growth. Biggest bottlenecks right now are still the database and the space required for images. I hate to say it, but notice all the 500s recently? We’re working to fix those but it’s not a resource issue related to just use more CPU/RAM No matter how much is thrown at Lemmy for that, all it does is buy more time before the stack crashes again. So 4hrs bs every 20min. Absolutely need to identify the root causes and fix them. But thdr amount of firepower isn’t required to run stuff here, just required to keep us running longer.
