The September 2023 Beehaw Financial Update

obligatory preface: we’re 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us.

overall expenses this month: $264.50

We downsized this month which has significantly brought down our costs, but it involved quite a few steps so it’s a bit complicated to roll everything up. For simplicity purposes I rolled all the snapshots, backups, and hosting together for old/new droplets by service.

$177.46 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into

  • $157.50 for hosting the site itself
  • $2.28 for backups
  • $17.68 for site snapshots

$29.60 for Hive, an internal chat platform we’ve set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)

  • $24.00 for hosting Hive
  • $4.80 for backups
  • $0.80 for snapshots

~$39.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into

  • $35/mo for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam)
  • ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)

$18.28 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that’s standalone from Digital Ocean)

overall contributions this month: $1,033.82

support still more than covers our expenses, thank you everyone! breakdown is:

  • 114 monthly contributions, totaling $793.82
  • 12 one-time donations, totaling $240.00It seems like the majority of our flow has shifted to monthly contributions and we are still sustainable overall

total end of month balance: $4,701.66

expense runway, assuming no further donations

  • assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about 17 months and three weeks of runway
Auzy,

That’s actually really good news. Congrats.

Looks like you may even have some spare beer money left over

arnoid,

It’s so great and refreshing to have this level of transparency!

storksforlegs,
@storksforlegs@beehaw.org avatar

It looks like there’s been an increase in donations, this is great! :) Thanks again for the updates.

Nia,

Looks very healthy, I’m glad to have an instance I can trust to not dissapear overnight. Thank you all for everything you do.

Hopefully some more Lemmy optimization stuff happens so it ends up being cheaper to host, I don’t know much about it but from what I’ve heard Lemmy storage use is crazy because of image caching/storage or something like that.

Gaywallet,
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

Every image from every server you federate with gets locally cached. You can’t turn it off and there’s no tools for the image DB. You don’t use the cache when people click links to images on other instances either, it retrieves it from the instance it’s hosted on. It’s a rather serious issue

d3Xt3r,

Just wanted to say thanks for the transparency, and thanks to the mod team for making Beehaw such a great community!

newtraditionalists,

Thanks for everything you and the team do! And thanks to all users for contributing to this instance, and helping to make it as great as it is!

Ellvix,

Is the linked opencollective system the best / only way to donate? When I first joined and was unsure and hopping around on instances I starting doing patreon mastodon.world; does any of that flow towards beehaw?

Lionir,

OpenCollective is the only way to donate to Beehaw.

Only Lemmy.world / Mastodon.world get the money you give to them, of course. Same goes if you donate to Beehaw.

alyaza,
@alyaza@beehaw.org avatar

past four months of data, for anyone wondering. a wiki page for this should be forthcoming in the days to come

June July August September
Contributions $705.00 $3,870.44 $1,310.90 $1,033.82
Expenses $54.00 $566.98 $523.79 $264.50
Difference +$651.00 +$3,303.46 +$787.11 +$769.32
Balance $726.51 $3,591.33 $4,347.79 $4,701.66
Penguincoder,

Nicely laid out thanks Alyaza!

ericjmorey,

Why is the balance not going up by an amount equal to the Difference between Contributions and Expenses?

alyaza,
@alyaza@beehaw.org avatar

almost certainly because we tend to bundle expenses for multiple months together/as the person running the expense needs it billed (more convenient for all involved), so funds aren’t coming out on the same monthly basis as funds coming in

ericjmorey,

Cash basis vs Accrual basis bookkeeping strikes again!

Rentlar,

Hey alyaza, I’m glad to see you back and hopefully doing well. Wishing you and the rest of the admin team all the best running this community.

minishoemaze,
@minishoemaze@beehaw.org avatar

The longer I am on Beehaw the more I appreciate it. Proud to be a contributor and grateful for you all 🐝👍

soeren,

awesome. you are really creating something special with your instance and it seems to pay off. how are you paying only $2.28 on digital ocean for backups? did you stop using digital ocean backups?

Gaywallet,
@Gaywallet@beehaw.org avatar

I think we utilized snapshots to downsize so there were less backups this month

Penguincoder,

This is sort of correct. Doing file level backups with restic to B2 for needed data files. The system can always bee reinstalled as needed, its the data on it that we need to save; not the whole thing. So 1 snapshot this month for last month of the whole system, a ‘known-working-good’. Then did a bunch of updates, configurations, and restorations. Didn’t need to roll back, so removed the snapshot.

Backups are still working just not doing it on DigitalOcean side.

In addition, the costs will be lower next month for DO as well. They charge you for the time a VPS is on. This month, the beefy expensive server was on for a ‘few weeks’ even though it wasn’t serving ‘beehaw.org’. Just needed to sync some things and files between that one and the new, smaller tier DO. Still charged for the time that expensive one was on. Next month (This one? Sep) won’t have that beefy server on it at all. So; should see lower cost.

soeren,

Thanks for the response I was never in doubt about your backup process. The digital ocean pricing for the backups seemed low to me compared what digital ocean suggest what backups would cost for me.

menturi,

I really appreciate the trancparency. I’m happy to call this my home hive.

TimTheEnchanter,

Thanks, as always, for the info!

MangoKangaroo,

That’s a pretty healthy difference between donation income and expenditures. You love to see it.

RagnarokOnline,

Thank you for setting the standard for transparency and professionalism with user funding.

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