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
  • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
    911·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      25·
      2 months ago

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

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
        261·
        2 months ago

        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)

      • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝@feddit.ukEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        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).

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      15·
      2 months ago

      Thanks, I remember seeing it some time ago, but it’s a bit hard to really identify how much the Lemmy instance exactly costs

  • nutomic@lemmy.mlEnglish
    483·
    2 months ago

    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.

          • matcha_addict@lemy.lolEnglish
            4·
            2 months ago

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

            • imaqtpie@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
              4·
              2 months ago

              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.

              • Redjard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                3·
                2 months ago

                You can compare total better than per user at these scales.
                Lemmy needs a certain amount of performance to keep up with federation, but once you have all the images and posts and comments you don’t need second versions until you scale to a size that mandates multiple machines. Which I would guess is more in the 6+ digit user range, where you start averaging requests per second not minute.

                In some sense, every lemmy user is a user of your instance via federation. You need to pay the performance for all 100k of us whether your instance has 10 or 10k of those. Local users are just a bit extra demanding on your hosting resources.

                I suspect the bias we see here with larger instances paying a bit more (50-ish instead of 10-ish) is more due to reliability and snappyness than actual performance needs too. You tend to get optional smaller-gains pricier perks you might not go for for a smaller instance.

          • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
            22·
            2 months ago

            Looking at the domain name, they’re in Mali. Things must be cheap out there.

  • originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com
    35·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    32·
    2 months ago

    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

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    27·
    2 months ago

    6.84€ per month. And that’s 6.84€ per user. But I also run a dozen of other services on that VPS.

  • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
    24·
    2 months ago

    About 62 USD per month. I post monthly finance updates. All the costs are covered by user donations so far :)

    It might be possible to do it cheaper, but I feel I got a good deal for some very high end hardware so this setup should be scalable going forward for a long time.

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dkEnglish
        15·
        2 months ago

        I mean, I can’t really take credit - the users on Feddit.dk are the ones that deserve the praise. I’ve been very surprised at the willingness to donate. We have almost 18 months of runway and that runway has mostly only gone up as time went by. Feddit.dk is not going anywhere anytime soon :)

      • wjs018@lemmy.worldEnglish
        10·
        2 months ago

        I think that user donations are easier when an instance has a good focus. There are some other instances I can think of where the donation model has been enough to cover things. In addition to feddit.dk and beehaw, an instance I use most of the time, ani.social, is more than covered by donations last I checked. It looks like @hitagi@ani.social even took away the donate link in the sidebar. Never mind, I am just blind. I didn’t notice the little Ko-fi badge at the bottom. I was looking for a text link.

        • hitagi@ani.socialEnglish
          3·
          2 months ago

          I made it a small badge so people wouldn’t have to feel obligated to donate. But yes, the entire instance has been community funded already thanks to generous one-time and monthly donations!

  • 鴉河雛@PieFed@pf.korako.meEnglish
    20·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.netEnglish
      8·
      2 months ago

      ¥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?

      • 鴉河雛@PieFed@pf.korako.me
        5·
        2 months ago

        I probably post frequently.
        Number of Posts by Month

        File servers and multiple BOTs are also running.

        It may be a little expensive, but it is a typical amount of money for a VPS that runs Mastodon somewhat comfortably in Japan.
        SAKURA internet VPS

        ※Sorry, I’m using machine translation.

      • wesley@yall.theatl.socialEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        Yea that seems pretty high. I have a solo pixelfed server that runs around $5 / month. It doesn’t get a lot of use though

  • CRUMBGRABBER@lemm.eeEnglish
    20·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • patrick@lemmy.bestiver.seEnglish
    191·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgOPEnglish
      41·
      2 months ago

      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.

      FYI, there is https://communick.com/ which offers exactly that. The admin is @rglullis@communick.news

    • lemmyingly@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      I’ve been curious about going alone on the Fedi but I’ve always been concerned about data storage. How much drive space do you think is required? I presume it accumulates over time.

  • troed@fedia.io
    17·
    2 months ago

    @seb@ioc.exchange publishes the costs for ioc.exchange:

    Servers are hosted at Linode and hosting costs are around $300/month. Media files are hosted in AWS S3 and the costs are around $50/month. So in total our running costs are about $350/month.

    Unfortunately the donations still don’t cover it.

    This is your regular reminder that our hosting costs are roughly $350 per month. In the last 30 days you all have contributed $216. Thank you very much for everyone who has contributed - You are awesome!

    edit: User numbers from fedidb: 1,737 MAU, 26,315 total.

  • Tamlyn@lemmy.zipEnglish
    15·
    2 months ago

    Lemmy.zip stats can be found here: Lemmy.zip

    Our Admin gives us a monthly report. We are at 54$ while visitor count, rewlquest count can be seen at the report.

      • Tamlyn@lemmy.zipEnglish
        6·
        2 months ago

        Yes about 0.10$ per user. But we know only a few pay a bit more. Look at the open collective link on the post

      • Demigodrick@lemmy.zipEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        There are additional costs that aren’t factored in (although they’re not specifically lemmy, and I pay for them myself rather than use donations) such as a very cheap vps for our status.lemmy.zip page and i got a 3 year deal for an external email provider for less than some email providers wanted a month.

        Our server is the same one feddit.uk use (a hetzner auction server) although lemmy.zips I think was a touch more expensive per month. But it’s got a lot of room for growth.

        Also we now host all our backups offside too, which adds a little on top. I’ll probably cover this in the next server update.

  • hitagi@ani.socialEnglish
    15·
    2 months ago

    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).

      • hitagi@ani.socialEnglish
        7·
        2 months ago

        Right now: 0.3GB per user per month. This number is probably much higher for other instances because I don’t keep copies of federated images anymore and I’ve been compressing images early on.

        This doesn’t include bandwidth and backups.

        • matcha_addict@lemy.lolEnglish
          5·
          2 months ago

          That’s pretty high… Leads me to consider hosting an instance on local hardware. I know that’s a whole security mess to deal with, but it night be worthwhile since I have lots of spare storage.