Hi all, this is (I think) the first Lemmy.nz financial update! In case you missed it, we are no longer piggybacking on someone else's hosting and now have our own virtual server.
Now that we have to pay our own way, I am going to start doing semi-regular updates about how things are going. I am thinking quarterly updates.
This quarter we have migrated to a new VPS and moved images to object storage, each of which has an ongoing cost. Other potential costs are email sending (which to date I don't believe we have ever crossed over the free sending threshold for Mailgun) and the domain registration, which is already paid up for a couple of years.
Expenses for January-March 2026: $369.53
The expenses are made up of:
- VPS: $358.10
- Image and backup storage: $11.43
Expenses are allocated to the period they were paid, not to the period they cover. The VPS expense covers the first month, plus a further 6 months, which makes this look a lot more expensive than it should. The image and backup storage only includes a partial month for February and does not include March as March will be billed in April based on usage.
Contributions in January-March 2026: $35
We received two donations totalling $35 this quarter.
Overall position: -$289.53
This ending balance is mostly because I have paid for hosting 6 months in advance. I started collecting donations late last year, and we had $45 donated, so we actually started with $45 at the start of the quarter.
- Opening balance: $45
- Contributions: $35
- Expenses: -$369.53
- Total: -$289.53
- Percent of expenses paid for by contributions: 21%
An update on our move to the VPS
We have now had over a month on the VPS. The specs we have seem to be appropriate with RAM constantly at 80% use, the CPU peaks at an occasional 90% but averaging around 40%, and the hard drive storage at about 83% which may need a little more space soon, adding another dollar or two a month.
In March we cut it pretty close on bandwidth usage as I am using a new backup tool and didn't have compression set up right initially, which burnt through a lot of data in the first week. So I have been carefully rationing what is used for offsite transfer to keep us within the 1TB allocation for this month, however, it does feel like we could move away from Cloudflare's caching and still be within the 1TB in the future. I will let it run all April and see what sort of usage we have.
Donations
If you want to contribute to the cost of running Lemmy.nz, see the post here.
The usual caveat: Please don't contribute if it will impact you financially. I don't want to see anyone saying "I only had $5 in my bank account but Lemmy is important so I donated my last $5" like I've seen on other instances. If you can't afford it then don't feel bad, this round is on me. I don't mind, truly. But if you can easily chip in a few bucks a month, then it is appreciated 🙂
Pātai
As usual, feel free to ask any questions!