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Server costs per November 25th 2022

Nov 25, 2022

Hey everyone! 👋

I wanted to provide you with a new update about the finances involving our generic Mastodon instance, toot.community.

Previous update: https://blog.toot.community/posts/server-costs-8-nov-2022/

I have introduced Ko-Fi, next to Patreon. Patreon is great, but they take almost 10% of all donations for their services. Ko-Fi is free; therefore, I’m posting this update from Ko-Fi as I intend to move Patreon into the background.

Estimated costs per November 25th, 2022

In the previous update, our estimated costs totaled $616/month, with 15,491 users. Today, we have 22,757 people that joined toot.community, and our total cost is $627/month. This nicely reflects our efforts to optimize the platform, as we’ve grown almost 100% without increasing the costs.

We’re exploring moving away from Mailgun and using Amazon SES, as they’re significantly cheaper. The database portion of these costs is also quite big, and we’re evaluating if the managed database product of DigitalOcean still fits our needs.

Traffic statistics

  • 71,5 million requests handled in the last seven days
  • 2,95 TB data transferred in the last seven days
  • 365k pages viewed in the last seven days
  • 28,5 API requests served in the last seven days

Our income

I’m overwhelmed with the support that came from the community when we asked people to pitch in.

  • Patreon recurring income: gross $677/month, minus 8% service fee, 5% payment processing fee, net ±$597/month
  • Ko-Fi recurring income: $128/month

Total recurring monthly income: $725/month

This means that we’re no longer operating at a loss, for which I’m beyond grateful. This allows me to plan, build & grow toot.community for the long-term future without having to worry about paying the bills.

Next to recurring donations, people massively donated one-off. We’ve received $1,316 bring our total income in the first 22 days of toot.community’s existance up to $2,041.

I’d like to address that I’m running toot.community from an altruistic viewpoint, I’m not seeking to make a profit out of this. We’ve only existed for 22 days right now which is nearly not long enough to assess the average running costs and income over a longer period of time. We’re going to hold a healthy financial buffer to be less fragile for abrupt changes (hello mr. Musk) and form a plan what we’ll do with the remainder of funds. Of course, I’ll be transparant about this and include the community as much as possible in the decision making.

A little note about the growth process

We’ve started using an automated process which will open and close toot.community registrations depending on the amount of new people flowing in, while also factoring in the people who already lost interest in Mastodon. This allows us to manage our growth rate so it stays healthy, for our mental sanity and the server’s stability.

Shoutouts

A big thanks to my friend and co-admin, @mijndert, for helping me manage the infrastructure. He’s the absolute best when it comes to managing complex scaling issues. I’d also like to thank @DulceMaria for helping us moderate our community. With her being active while us Dutch guys sleep, we’ve reached around the clock attention for moderation reports.

If any of you have any questions, please let me know. Thanks for reading and until the next time. 🙏

Written by @jorijn.