Hey all!
I promised to write an update about our current financial situation. This post will list all the incomes and expenses for the past few months up until today. I will also try to give some estimates on future expenses.
Let’s start with expenses
June
- 14.12€ - Outgoing e-mails
- 222.28€ - Cloudflare Pro (1 year subscription, paid upfront)
July
- 94.32€ - Server infrastructure for June
- 22.06€ - Outgoing e-mails
August
- 280.70€ - Server infrastructure for July
- 13.84 - Outgoing e-mails
Total expenses so far: 647.32€
Next up: income
June
- 500€ - initial contribution by myself
July
- 174.66€ - Ko-Fi donations for June
August
- 247.64€ - Ko-Fi donations for July
- 1358.95€ - GitHub sponsorships for June, July and August (pending until the 22nd)
Total income so far: 922.30€ + 1358.95€ (pending)
Current balance: 274.98€ (cleared) + 1358.95€ (pending)
One more note regarding the donations: the bulk of the donation income is actually from early July. Initially in July, the split between one time and recurring donations was roughly 50%-50%, but at this point in August, most (over 90%) of income is generated by recurring donations.
Let me also try to answer a few potential questions:
Why is the GitHub sponsorship income pending?
I opened GitHub sponsorships in June. GitHub has a policy to initially hold all funds for a 60-day probation period to prevent abuse, so they have been holding all sponsorships for the past few months. As of today, we have passed the 60-day period, and I can see an update in my dashboard which says that all accumulated funds will be released on the 22nd (and any future funds will be paid out monthly after that).
Will infrastructure costs keep increasing?
I don’t want to jinx it, but in fact I believe we have managed to stabilize costs for now. I expect August costs to be more or less similar to July. I don’t have an exact figure here, because I am constantly scaling resources up to respond to spikes in traffic, and scaling down whenever I am able to optimize any slow parts of Lemmy. But on average I believe we won’t be using more resources in August than we did in July.
By the way, quick side note here: many developers have submitted several great optimization patches to Lemmy over the summer, and without this, it would be almost impossible to run Lemmy at its current scale. I’m 100% sure that if the whole network downgraded to 0.17.4 today, the network would just collapse. Having said that, there is still a long way to go with optimizations, with many known issues that still need to be solved.
How long will our current funds last us?
Assuming we don’t need to massively scale up servers any time soon, our current buffer will last us at least until the end of 2023, if not longer.
I want to give a huge thanks to all sponsors and donors - as you can see from the numbers, you are having a huge effect on the financial viability of lemm.ee!
We have certainly scaled past a point where I could financially support lemm.ee just on my own, so all lemm.ee users truly owe their gratitude to all sponsors for covering the costs of this platform.
As always, if anybody has any further questions or comments, please let me know!
I consider lemm.ee my home, and you guys my internet family. @sunaurus on a somewhat personal note, I saw you mention in one of your updates a week or two ago you were getting let go from your job, which coincided with some much needed home repairs. If you haven’t landed a new job yet, I’d like to throw some cash your way for personal expenses, and I’m sure others would too. I don’t want you working on keeping the instance running smoothly from the coffee shop down the road because your power or internet got turned off. If you’re in a rough spot, I kind of like the idea of doing a fund raiser on, let’s say 8/18 - 8/19 (UTC) where all one time Github and Ko-Fi contributions get aside for you and your family.
I really appreciate the kind message, but I’m actually not in a rough spot financially for now. Fortunately I have some savings, so assuming I can land a new job soon (and I already have several interview processes active now), I will be totally fine, no fundraiser necessary.
To be clear, I would find it extremely amazing if sponsorships ever increase to a point where the income would cover something resembling a full time salary (in addition to infra costs) - in such a situation, I would definitely switch to working on open source full time and paying myself out of the sponsorships, but I think that’s not realistic any time soon (if ever 😅)