Question triggered by the other post about instances shutting down due to costs
Here’s the stats for mastodon.world and Lemmy.world
(And a few other fediverse sites)
Instance admins, how much does it cost you to run your instance? How much does that represent per active user?
Submitted 2 months ago by Blaze@feddit.org to fediverse@lemmy.world
Comments
subtext@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Blaze@feddit.org 2 months ago
Thanks, I remember seeing it some time ago, but it’s a bit hard to really identify how much the Lemmy instances costs
nutomic@lemmy.ml 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.
morrowind@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
that’s quite low. There must be a lot of barely active users
Blaze@feddit.org 2 months ago
2.39K monthly active users
4th most active instance (fedidb.org/software/lemmy/ )
Hosts 10 of the 100 most active communities (lemmy.ca/post/26878531 )
matcha_addict@lemy.lol 2 months ago
Why is it low? Lemmy scales very well and isn’t resource intensive
Blaze@feddit.org 2 months ago
Thank you!
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 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
lemmyingly@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Cost per month or year?
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 months ago
month
hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 2 months ago
6.84€ per month. And that's 6.84€ per user.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 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 good deal for some very high end hardware so this setup should be scalable going forward for a long time.
Blaze@feddit.org 2 months ago
All the costs are covered by user donations so far :)
Well done!
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 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.world 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.
Emperor@feddit.uk 2 months ago
This has been our experience at feddit.uk. Well done to everyone over there. 👍
Crumbgrabber@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Interesting pattern emerging, the IT time of the admins is pretty damn priceless, (thank you admins!) and 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.
karasu_sue@pf.korako.me 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.net 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?
karasu_sue@pf.korako.me 2 months ago
I probably post frequently.
Number of Posts by MonthFile 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.social 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
patrick@lemmy.bestiver.se 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.
Blaze@feddit.org 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 communick.com which offers exactly that. The admin is @rglullis@communick.news
rglullis@communick.news 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.
lemmyingly@lemm.ee 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.
Valmond@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I have my thinkcentre that I use as main PC on at all times, and it’s basically free in the autumn/winter/early spring as its energy consumption serves as a heater. And orherwise I use it. So say 100 nights uh to be generous 1000h a year for what, 30watt so 30kwh at under 0.2€ equals say 6€.
I’m all alone on the server though so it costs 6€ a year per user I guess 😁
tamlyn@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Blaze@feddit.org 2 months ago
$54/504, so around $0.11 per user
tamlyn@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Yes about 0.10$ per user. But we know only a few pay a bit more. See tge open collective link on the post
Demigodrick@lemmy.zip 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.
lemmyadmin@eviltoast.org 2 months ago
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.
Blaze@feddit.org 2 months ago
There’s less than 20 mau, but I pay close to $400/mo.
Wait, what?
lemmyadmin@eviltoast.org 2 months ago
It’s infra that was already hosting other things. Lemmy got added to it because there were spare resources in the cluster.
hitagi@ani.social 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).
rickyrigatoni@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Does the image hosting feature use checksums to reduce the amount of duplicate images?
hitagi@ani.social 2 months ago
No, I don’t think it removes duplicate images.
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Beehaw’s financial update beehaw.org/post/15866385
Blaze@feddit.org 2 months ago
Thanks! Looks like $183.58/372, so $0,49 per user per month
user68k@wired.bluemarch.art 2 months ago
This instance runs on the cheapest Hetzner VPS, so €4.18 per month plus yearly domain cost. Right now there is only one active user on this instance so the price for an active user is a bit high, but I don’t really care because I would pay for a VPS even when I don’t run a Lemmy instance on it.
iso@lemy.lol 2 months ago
About $50 monthly for server, backups, image hosting, mails etc.
teuto@lemmy.teuto.icu 2 months ago
For my single user instance, I can be charitable and say that it’s running on hardware that I already had that is running regardless on spare otherwise unused resources with a already registered domain so the only cost is time spent setting it up. Or I could apply all the costs from the server Lemmy, then it would be about $1200 initially plus ~$10/mo per user.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 2 months ago
Start your own for you. Let ~1k users join. Then 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.
SorteKanin@feddit.dk 2 months ago
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.
Blaze@feddit.org 2 months ago
On that topic, could limiting the posting of pictures and asking people to use external picture hosts help with that?
helenslunch@feddit.nl 2 months ago
Of course it is. More queries = more resources.
flamingos@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Feddit.uk makes our finances public, about £35 a month.
Also, I run sappho.social out of a £5 a month VPS.
5714@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
From the comments I see, feddit.uk seems to have the lowest unit costs with 11 pennce.
Blaze@feddit.org 2 months ago
Reminds me of Mary Poppins
m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5Wb_sTdJVg
Emperor@feddit.uk 2 months ago
Worth also noting that:
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).