Instance admins, how much does it cost you to run your instance? How much does that represent per active user?

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.

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

Feddit.uk makes our finances public, about £35 a month. So about £0.11 per active user.

Also, I run sappho.social out of a £5 a month VPS.

From the comments I see, feddit.uk seems to have the lowest unit costs with 11 pennce.
- Reminds me of Mary Poppins
  
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T5Wb_sTdJVg
- 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).

Here’s the stats for mastodon.world and Lemmy.world

(And a few other fediverse sites)

https://blog.mastodon.world/blog-post-for-august-2024-and-july

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

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.

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

Cost per month or year?
- month

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

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.

All the costs are covered by user donations so far :)

Well done!
- 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 :)
- 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.
This has been our experience at feddit.uk. Well done to everyone over there. 👍

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.

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.

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
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.
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.

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.

¥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?
- I probably post frequently.
  
  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.
- 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

@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.

5 bucks per month per active user sounds excessively expensive, no?
- Yeah I think you got the numbers crossed there :D

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.

$54/504, so around $0.11 per user
- Yes about 0.10$ per user. But we know only a few pay a bit more. Look at the open collective link on the post
- 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.

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).

How much storage per user per time, would you estimate?
- 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.

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 😁

Beehaw's financial update https://beehaw.org/post/15866385

Thanks! Looks like $183.58/372, so $0.49 per user per month

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.

There’s less than 20 mau, but I pay close to $400/mo.

Wait, what?
- It's infra that was already hosting other things. Lemmy got added to it because there were spare resources in the cluster.

About $50 monthly for server, backups, image hosting, mails etc.

We run on the cheapest Hetzner VPS we can, which is about $8 USD/month. Pictrs are on cloudflare R2. Pictrs storage hovers around 14GB and we have yet to get a non-zero invoice.

Our active users are super low (I think). I don't think the lemmy interface tells you the number of active users for in instance, just for communities, but since it's a niche instance I can safely say it's around 10 people.

So that's a little less than a dollar per month per user. On the existing VPS I think we could safely add a bunch of users without needing to upgrade.

I don’t think the lemmy interface tells you the number of active users for in instance

I think what you see on the main page (at the bottom right, just below the instance description/rules) is the instance's specific stats.
- Oh that's cool. I was right, only 9 monthly users.

wired.bluemarch.art 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.

Is the shutdown about cost per user? why not just limit signups in a case like that? I sorta assumed some instances were personal instances with no real signups and some where more open public. I don't see why someone can't run something with the intention of carrying like 10 users max or 100 or 1000 or what not.

I think a lot of people start up a server because at the time it fits with what they want to do. Once you realize this is not a job (correct description) you wanted to take on it becomes much harder to motivate it.

As soon as you run a server for others outside of the immediate friends/family circle it can be really difficult to deal with the expectations of uptime and service. Also, some don't want to ask for help but also take on all the moderation themselves too.
- how much can someone limit the instance? Like can they not allow magazine creation? It would be good for the good folks who run instances to think about scope and set limits. That does mean some large instances will be the backbone but that does not change that small instances will lighten the load and increase robustness.

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.