the July 2023 Beehaw financial update

alyaza [they/she]@beehaw.orgmod to Beehaw Support@beehaw.org – 37 points –
opencollective.com

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 :)

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Truly appreciate you making this information public. I think it underscores the feeling of community and the idea that we’re all in this together, to see these numbers and be able to contribute to them. I’ve never used a site that includes its people in these discussions, and i have to say as a non techy person this budget is not as intimidating as I’d thought it would be. This feels….sustainable? Collective? And very positive. Thank you all who worked on this in any capacity.

Love the transparency, I set up my monthy contribution already, glad to pay for this, wouldn't pay a cent to corporate re**it.

I didn't know this kind of transparency existed before today. Thank you for everything you do!

Just want to say I appreciate the transparency. Keep up the good work!

Glad y'all aren't in the red. Appreciate the work.

I was so worried this was going to be a "We desperately need financial support" and was pleasantly surprised to find it to be "More financial support would be extremely beneficial to ensure continued success, but things look okay." Once I know what my month's finances are, I will be signed up for an annual donation

Nice to see you guys have some reserves too. It is a little bit of a crazy time knowing what ongoing costs will be so reserves can be really helpful.

Thanks for sharing - interesting to see a breakdown like that. Very much interested to see what next month looks like too, accounting for the Reddit migrations.

In the event that the runway did end up shortening for whatever reason, do you think it's likely that registrations would be put on hold as a way of capping expansion until more funding could be secured?

Registrations themself don't factor into the infrastructure cost of Beehaw. What does matter, is number of concurrent users and maximizing the efficiency of the service, to handle the load better.

I would rather move to a lower cost provider than to just stop all registrations due to server load. Helix, Remington and I are working hard to increasing the performance of Lemmy and our backend to handle more users. We don't want to or expect to keep throwing money at this problem.

In the event that the runway did end up shortening for whatever reason, do you think it’s likely that registrations would be put on hold as a way of capping expansion until more funding could be secured?

i'll defer to @Penguincoder@beehaw.org and @Lionir@beehaw.org here but i think it's more likely we'd just switch to a cheaper host or something (which we're already probably going to do).[^1] most of our issues if that runway gets shorter presumably won't be with people signing up so much as just general traffic.

[^1]: Digital Ocean is fine for most of our purposes but it's on the expensive end long-term and we hit the point of diminishing returns with our last upgrade. we already don't use most of what we're paying for, strictly speaking--it really only has some side benefits it shouldn't in the first place because Lemmy is weird.

Wow, I never thought I'd see this level of transparency! Thanks for sharing all this info!

It makes it easy to justify signing up for monthly contributions when resources can be seen mapped against cash burn like this. Thanks!

What's the hive? A matrix instance?

What’s the hive? A matrix instance?

yes, for internal stuff/as our main base of admin-to-admin communication and for our Matrix-using mods. we'd do this on Lemmy with a private community or something but as far as we're aware we literally can't (there appears to be no functionality for something like that, to our chagrin, and i can't imagine it's high on the priority list so we'll have to make do)

This is a post that I didn’t know I needed. Haven’t considered donating to Beehaw previously much, but your transparency made me submit a monthly contribution. I encourage everyone to do so, you can set it up very easily with amounts as little as 1$ a month to keep the federated future alive.

Thanks for sharing, I appreciate the work you folks are putting into this!

This is real awesome lol! I love the transparency and an just want to say I'm really loving it here! So so glad someone recommended it because Lemmy almost turned me off of this whole federated thing and now I'm on Mastadon AND Beehaw 🤣

When can I buy Beehaw merch? I want a polo shirt with a tiny Beehaw logo embroidered on the top left.

There is unfortunately no Merch 😓

Maybe later but this is pretty hard to do and we're spread way too thin to do more at the moment.

I suppose they might be able to have them made themselves locally. Using files or something. Just an idea.

We've discussed this in the past, and it's something we're open to the idea of, but we'd like for the merch to be sustainable and to provide resources for people that need it, rather than large companies. If someone on this website happens to run a small business making some kind of merchandise and can handle the volume they'd likely see, we're more than open to working with them, but it's way down low in terms of priorities.

Thanks for sharing, especially on a weekend. I tend to avoid looking at anything remotely financial on a weekend!

Appreciate the transparency. I'd also be interested to see what you guys have done infrastructure-wise to handle all the new traffic. Just increased the size of your server instance?

Initially, yes. Ongoing, no. Lots of various tuning, caching, performance checks, some code changes to Lemmy itself for our usecase, etc.

Thank you for your hard work, and thanks to the donators for making this possible!

Apologies if this has been asked elsewhere, I haven't seen it: How are the core team compensated for their work on the platform? I appreciate that it's a passion project, but I'm sure y'all have bills to pay.

Apologies if this has been asked elsewhere, I haven’t seen it: How are the core team compensated for their work on the platform?

short answer: we aren't.

long answer: we extremely aren't. the person who has financially benefited the most from running the site is the person who makes our icons, because we try to pay a fair wage to people whose labor we use that isn't our own. the site quite literally would not be able to function if we were compensated for doing this--on our end-of-month balance we'd fund about a week of work total between all of us, assuming the quite-low-by-software-standards $15/hr wage.

I appreciate that it’s a passion project, but I’m sure y’all have bills to pay.

can't speak for the other mods but i currently benefit from not having a job and not technically having bills to pay. i assume the others have jobs which cover their expenses but as you can probably infer this means we can't do this as a full time job which makes it vital it doesn't become one

Thanks for the transparency. There's a big appetite for this sort of platform, so I hope you're able to lean on other volunteers to avoid overloading yourselves.

I know you didn't ask but give a look at Contabo as host.

It costs much less because it's just that, vpc provider, not an accelerator or anything else but if you have the people with the skill set to take care of the ingress side of things, it's a lot more sensible in terms of expenses.

Thanks for the information. It's really helpful to see whether or not such sites are possible to run on donations/goodwill alone.

Curious, what are the specs of the DO VM?

other admins can fill in with more specifics but just based on the dashboard:

16 vCPUs / 32GB / 160GB Disk

Thanks for sharing. That's tiny compared to the VMs we use at work. I'm always impressed how much more efficient grassroots setups are compared to bloated corporate ones.

Have you considered using the DO managed database products to improve scalability?

That's quite a considerable amount of firepower. It's amazing how much computer grunt is used for the task of "moving text".

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.

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?

Thanks for sharing! Alway appreciate the transparency!

I see that there’s a “Support Lemmy” option over there, but is there a way to specifically send a donation to Beehaw, or does it just go to Lemmy in general?

Noting that this "Support Lemmy" option does not send us any money. It's for the two main developers of Lemmy.