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 :)
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.
At some point one box won't do it anymore and having the images on some form of object store will be necessary. Fortunately pict-rs supports that, unfortunately that's eventually a money pit unless you start applying TTLs.
As for the 500s, I don't yet have hands-on with the stack. Wish I did, but I'm still not in a position to actually help.
I’ve never used DigitalOcean myself, so I was just curious about something implementation wise. Do you all have Kubernetes set up for managing multiple lemmy instances, or are all the resources dedicated to one lemmy instance?