I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?

  • bdonvrA
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    63
    ·
    8 months ago

    My instance of ~300 users (and uh, far less active ones) is costing me $223/year

    I’ve had users donate about $25 so ~10% community funded and 90% admin funded.

    That’s fine by me at the current cost. Though if we somehow got a bunch of new users I’d have to cut off signups at some point unless more donations rolled in. I could probably handle a sizeable increase in users first though.

    • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      27
      ·
      8 months ago

      Thank you for being transparent. This helps those of us who don’t know how to spool up our own instance figure out how much to donate. Much appreciated.

      • bdonvrA
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        8 months ago

        $15/mo server rental, plus a few dollars to store backups on a separate service, object storage for media, email, and domain registration. Total $18.64

        I have a home server that could easily handle it, but I wouldn’t want to put something so public on it.

          • Syringe@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            8 months ago

            If you’ve already got the infrastructure in place for other projects, it can drop costs dramatically. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone there was already doing a lot of web hosting and just threw this in their stack. There are also a number of housing companies that will cut great deals for non profits if they’re at up right.