Instance admins, how much does it cost you to run your instance? How much does that represent per active user?

Blaze@feddit.org to Fediverse@lemmy.world – 10 points –

Question triggered by the other post about instances shutting down due to costs

Summary of the answers:

  • lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
  • a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
  • obviously single user instance have higher costs
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I pay around 80€ per month for the lemmy.ml server, plus a few euros for image hosting and domain. So that's around 3 cents per active user.

that's quite low. There must be a lot of barely active users

Why is it low? Lemmy scales very well and isn't resource intensive

It's lower than every other number I've seen in this thread by far

Are you sure? Check again. I didn't scroll too far, but saw $6, $35, $20, $65 and $30. All are lower.

For cost per user, it's only 3 cents. A few others are around 10 cents per user, and the rest are significantly higher.

The instances with lower total cost also have much lower activity, lemmy.ml has 2.4k active users but still only 80€ per month. Impressive.

ML became an echo chamber and many have fled.

An echo chamber that if you say something they don't want to hear, you know, like the truth, you catch a ban.

I'm a truth seeker! And I'll kiss ANYONE to find the truth! You....your dad.....hey, where's dad at? I'll even kiss you! Maybe in 20-30 years when you look a bit more like your dad. Where is your dad anyways???

I have heard it is ban heavy, but it is still quite active in the memes and the Linux communities, and I enjoy both.

Feddit.uk makes our finances public, about £35 a month. So about £0.11 per active user.

Also, I run sappho.social out of a £5 a month VPS.

From the comments I see, feddit.uk seems to have the lowest unit costs with 11 pennce.

Worth also noting that:

  • We are currently only using about 1/4 of the resources, so people could trim the cost further (although being over specced helps a lot when there are spikes in activity and it will mean we don't have to upgrade any time soon).
  • Our hosting costs are more that fully covered by around 20 people donating and that should scale with growth (although possibly not in a truly linear way). We also have a decent "warchest" which should see us through most temporary problems.

One reason we break the finances down is because we are a medium-sized instance and we want to demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to run one supported by donations.

If anyone has any questions they are welcome to message me or they can drop it into the monthly financial report (the new one will be next week).

I managed to bring down ani.social's monthly costs to only ~14 USD when converted (which includes everything except backups). With 165 monthly users, that comes to around ~0.08 USD with a lot of accomodation.

Lemmy is efficient in resources except in storage (database and images) which grows infinitely. Unless you're purging older posts and images, it keeps growing (very slowly).

ive purposefully stood up my instance in a production, scalable environment.

i make my costs public on the https://moist.catsweat.com/faq page.

currently running ~1.60/day = 50$/month...

so far about $0.50/per user/month or $1.25/active user/month which should move downward until i hit resource limits and have to scale infrastructure.

Interesting pattern emerging, the IT time of the admins is pretty damn priceless, (thank you admins!) but when an instance gets up to scale a lot of them can end up with a hard cost of 10 cents per user per month.

The last stat I remember from Facebook was revenue per user per year was around 4 dollars. At 31b revenue and 2.7b monthly users, Youtubes average profit per user is about $10 per user per year. 100 million people pay for YT premium now.

So if every user paid $1 per month, it might not pay all the costs but the admins could get paid something and the fediverse could scale. The bigger you get though, you get economies of scale from future Fediverse data centers, but also you need really good programmers because its a huge temptation for hackers and propagandists.

I also want to say its a labor of love and a lot of work for mods too who may be non technical but the work and time they put in is important.

Good question!

Mine's a small instance and runs on my existing infrastructure, so my only real cost (aside from a crazy amount of unpaid time and stress) is the domain name which is about $20/year.

If I moved it to dedicated infrastructure, I've estimated it would cost me about $65/mo for just the backend, UI, and database services (to maintain the same level of performance, anyway. Could probably host it for less and take a performance hit). Object storage for pict-rs would probably be around $10/mo since I force it to use webp and have a 512 KB limit for user uploads.

Those numbers may be a little high, but they're based on my existing VPS provider which has amazing SLAs and uptime.

Thanks for sharing! What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?

What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?

Yeah, that, or if I decide one day I don't want to deal with my own hardware anymore. I've got a hybrid cloud infrastructure currently, and most of the heavy services (DB mostly) run on my own hardware for cost/performance reasons (and I have fiber, so might as well use it lol)

Mastodon is used by me alone and costs ¥1590/month.
Misskey is free with OCI for less than 5 people.
PieFed is ¥491/month.

Lemmy is the biggest server in Japan, but I host it at home because it has about 5 MAUs.
(Unfortunately, it is not popular in Japan.)

Media is R2, but it is still within the limits of no billing.

¥1590/month.

Rough $11/month in freedom dollars. That's not bad!

Still pricey for a solo use. What is your use cases? Lurking or a frequent poster?

Start your own for you. Open registration while keeping an eye on resources. When you hit hardware limits, close registration. Should be easy enough to manage moderation, and resources wouldn't cost much more than the initial costs of running it just for yourself.

The number of users is not really what drives costs honestly. Or at least, it's not like a linear relationship. I think actually having many popular communities might be a bigger issue.

Looking at just the hosting costs is actually a really bad indicator of total costs. The unpaid volunteer time just to run/manage the instance are likely going to be significantly more than the hosting costs if they were compensated even at minimum wage.

Each of the stacks for XXXiver.se and Bestiver.se (Mastodon + Lemmy + Static Site (+ Linkstack/Wiki for XXXiver.se premium)) are shoved into a Hetzner server at ~$13/month, and backed by R2 Object storage.

My current total hosting costs are ~$30/month to host 2xMastodon, 2xLemmy, 2xStatic Site, 1xLinkstack and 1xWiki. This is basically the minimum cost for me to host all of that on their own infra. I have approximately 0 users other than myself yet, so there's not really a useful cost/user and I can't really provide info on scaling.

Unlike most others here I'm seeing if I can make hosting into more of a job by selling the full suite of services to communities (e.g. get your own Mastodon + Lemmy + others) or by up-selling to premium accounts. I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money but I'm curious enough to try.

I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money.

Consider yourself lucky if you manage to break even. I am 5 years into this and the Fediverse side of things have been nothing but a money pit. The only thing that is not keeping me completely in the red is the custom Matrix hosting.

Masto admin here. Small instance. 20ish users. costs me about 1€ per user.

Most of the costs comes from media cache storage, so it would scale nicely if I had more users, but I want to keep it small

Oh man, I feel like eviltoast.org is on the expensive side of things now. There's less than 20 mau, but I pay close to $400/mo. Not including object storage or hardware running at home.

Realistically this is hosted on hardware I was already renting for other reasons, so actual cost is zero for lemmy itself. I could probably migrate to a small vm for $20/mo and only lose redundancy.

There’s less than 20 mau, but I pay close to $400/mo.

Wait, what?

It's infra that was already hosting other things. Lemmy got added to it because there were spare resources in the cluster.