I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?

  • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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    1 year ago

    My instance of ~300 users (and uh, far less active ones) is costing me $223/year

    I’ve had users donate about $25 so ~10% community funded and 90% admin funded.

    That’s fine by me at the current cost. Though if we somehow got a bunch of new users I’d have to cut off signups at some point unless more donations rolled in. I could probably handle a sizeable increase in users first though.

    • QuarterSwede@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Thank you for being transparent. This helps those of us who don’t know how to spool up our own instance figure out how much to donate. Much appreciated.

      • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
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        1 year ago

        $15/mo server rental, plus a few dollars to store backups on a separate service, object storage for media, email, and domain registration. Total $18.64

        I have a home server that could easily handle it, but I wouldn’t want to put something so public on it.

          • Syringe@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            If you’ve already got the infrastructure in place for other projects, it can drop costs dramatically. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone there was already doing a lot of web hosting and just threw this in their stack. There are also a number of housing companies that will cut great deals for non profits if they’re at up right.