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.
overall expenses this month: $523.79
as expected, a full month of running on last month's setup has come in pretty high. luckily, we expect downsizing to begin this month (and we have a pretty good idea of what we're going to do) so this will be our last month of costs at this scale. our initial estimation is that we can halve or better what we're paying now on a monthly basis.
$428.73 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into
- $336.00 for hosting the site itself
- $67.20 for backups
- $25.53 for site snapshots
$28.87 for Hive, an internal chat platform we've set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)
- $24.07 for hosting Hive
- $4.80 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)
$22.87 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)
overall contributions this month: $1,310.90
support still more than covers our expenses, and particularly with our upcoming downsizing we don't believe this will be a problem. breakdown is:
- 100 monthly contributions, totaling $624.95
- 2 yearly contributions, totaling $67.10
- 36 one-time donations, totaling $618.85
between monthly and yearly contributions we are still sustainable overall—but now that the Reddit bump has ebbed most of our savings will come in the form of lowering costs and not "sheer amount of money being thrown our way."
total end of month balance: $4,347.79
expense runway, assuming no further donations
- assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about 8 months and one week of runway
this is quite belated but now i'm back to a computer so i can answer this at some length: this is a fundamental issue of the fediverse which nobody has solved. the money is just not there for this to be any sort of compensated job, even at the level of "monthly stipend between the admins" (because that'd double the expenses you see here at minimum). maybe if this site was pay-to-join perhaps we could make a scheme like that work but that has its own drawbacks too--and at least in our case could select for an audience which would exclude many of the very people we want to make a space for.
there is a brute force answer which may or may not work in the long run, which is "have a lot of people keeping an eye on the website". that of course introduces its own vectors for issues but is basically the way we're making this work right now, and will probably be the case into the foreseeable future unless people get much more generous with their spending here.
Thanks for the detailed response. It doesn’t seem like there is a perfect answer here, but it is very important that you and other admins/mods can find some sort of sustainable way to delegate and manage for the long term. We really appreciate what you have done so far