I was trying to work out how much to donate to Kbin to keep the lights on. I read somewhere it costs something like $1/month per user?
Can we assume that 1/5 of users will be donating on a monthly basis?
So most people will be donating something like $5/month to cover the freeloaders and those that genuinely can't afford it?
Does that seem about right?
I was surprised to see that only 190 out of ~5k users have so far donated:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin
That maths doesn't work does it?
I hope there's a recurring payment option soon like Open Collective otherwise I'll probably forget to donate next month.
Current cost seems to be about 67€/mo (https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/9965/kbin-Just-Reddit-Things-update#entry-comment-43440).
The cost last month for a few hundred users will be 67/month.
I suspect you could spend several thousand this month and still not keep up with demand.
It's a virtuous circle, the faster it is the more people come.
For 6k users last month it cost €16/m
For 121k users at the moment (according to the website statistics posted here) it will cost €67/m, though I think we can all agree the system is a bit under provisioned at present, despite using the largest instance provided by the VPS (edit: not entirely true, see @ajar7 's reply below).
Assuming the truth is somewhere in between (I'm assuming the current state is ~30% under provisioned), and horizontal scaling will be both necessary and somewhat less efficient (I'm assuming ~40% less efficient than vertical scaling)
It comes to something like €0.001 per month per user.
At Wikipedia they get around 40,000 gifts of on average $15. They get something like 5.1B unique visits per month. That's roughly $0.00012 per visit.
The comparison seems to imply we need to get something like 10x the user/donor engagement of Wikipedia, which is very sobering.
https://www.hetzner.com/de/cloud has CCX41 and higher (under Dedicated vCPU tab), but that bumps the price tag over €180/mo. One needs to file a support request to up the vCPU limits above the CCX32 plan.
Gotcha. Thanks for the additional details, that makes a ton more sense.