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.
overall expenses this month: $523.79
as expected, a full month of running on last month's setup has come in pretty high. luckily, we expect downsizing to begin this month (and we have a pretty good idea of what we're going to do) so this will be our last month of costs at this scale. our initial estimation is that we can halve or better what we're paying now on a monthly basis.
$428.73 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into
- $336.00 for hosting the site itself
- $67.20 for backups
- $25.53 for site snapshots
$28.87 for Hive, an internal chat platform we've set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)
- $24.07 for hosting Hive
- $4.80 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)
$22.87 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)
overall contributions this month: $1,310.90
support still more than covers our expenses, and particularly with our upcoming downsizing we don't believe this will be a problem. breakdown is:
- 100 monthly contributions, totaling $624.95
- 2 yearly contributions, totaling $67.10
- 36 one-time donations, totaling $618.85
between monthly and yearly contributions we are still sustainable overall—but now that the Reddit bump has ebbed most of our savings will come in the form of lowering costs and not "sheer amount of money being thrown our way."
total end of month balance: $4,347.79
expense runway, assuming no further donations
- assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about 8 months and one week of runway
I mean, that's a question of trust. There's nothing I can do other than promise that I or any of the admins would never sell off Beehaw.
That said, if it reassures you, our disregard for "growth for the sake of growth" should push away any kind of company seeking money. It'd be much more lucrative to go for a big instance like lemmy.world.
How could we do more than ask for trust?
Speaking of that instance... has there been any progress on federating with them again?
I was surprised to see little talk about Donald's Jan6th charges on my feed, but after flipping accounts I realised most of the chatter was going on over there.
I don't particularly mind if I need a dedicated LW account... but it would be nice to be able to keep my posts consolidated under this one.
Unfortunately, the moderation and federation tools have received no attention at all. We've only noticed more and more problems...
I would really like to say yes but we're kinda stuck in this situation, especially considering that .world is now 10x the size of Beehaw.. We can't take this moderation load while the tools are all broken and missing.
That's a pity, but also very understandable.
Thank you for taking the time to reply ❤️