I am already hosting the AI Horde so I'm good with infrastructure. And since lemmy provided an ansible playbook which is my expertise, I thought it would be easy. And it was, even with my using my own loadbalancer solution instead of nginx.
I already had a server I wasn't using much for the AI Horde so I repurposed it. The DB physical I have is really good so I just made it share the DB for lemmy as well.
I pay for it from the same budget which runs on donations. I put a Kofi link on the sidebar and already covered so much of the costs that I sent some of the overflow to lemmy development