Mastodon.world Blog

Since the big inflow of users, the running cost for mastodon.world has increased significantly. Before November, it ran on a 100EUR/month server which I use for dozens of services.

That no longer was enough. I am very happy that the users of mastodon.world have donated generously, making the server upgrade and other enhancements possible.

Because the server is now funded by donations, it’s important we’re clear on the expenses we cover from them. That’s why I’ll post the expenses here, hopefully monthly.

Expenses for November

The expenses in November have been quite high, due to the ‘emergency fixing’ and server upgrade. This will be less in following months.

Expenses (in Euro’s):

• Hetzner – old server plus backup server: 105,90
• Mailgun
  • Plan 100k Nov: 28,91
  • Plan 250k Nov: 70,29
  • Plan 250k Dec plus overage Nov: 235,25
• Hetzner:
  • Backup server: 20,80
  • New server: 360,00
  • Cloud servers (monitoring & testserver) : 15,13
• Wasabi storage: 7,38

Total running costs: 843,66

Donations for November

Donations, after deduction of platform cost:

• OpenCollective: EUR 3406,08
• Patreon: $568.67

Conclusion

Costs were quite high in November, but the donations more than covered it. Seeing that part of the donations are recurring, I think we're financially safe for at least the coming months.

There will be less expenses in December (The one-time setup costs are only for this month, the e-mail solution will be changed), but maybe some extra costs will be needed for adding high-availability.

When everything looks stable financially, my goal is to have 6 months in reserve. Might we have money left after that, I will donate that to open-source projects.