This instance runs on the cheapest Hetzner VPS, so €4.18 per month plus yearly domain cost. Right now there is only one active user on this instance so the price for an active user is a bit high, but I don’t really care because I would pay for a VPS even when I don’t run a Lemmy instance on it.
Interesting pattern emerging, the IT time of the admins is pretty damn priceless, (thank you admins!) but when an instance gets up to scale a lot of them can end up with a hard cost of 10 cents per user per month.
The last stat I remember from Facebook was revenue per user per year was around 4 dollars. At 31b revenue and 2.7b monthly users, Youtubes average profit per user is about $10 per user per year. 100 million people pay for YT premium now.
So if every user paid $1 per month, it might not pay all the costs but the admins could get paid something and the fediverse could scale. The bigger you get though, you get economies of scale from future Fediverse data centers, but also you need really good programmers because its a huge temptation for hackers and propagandists.
I also want to say its a labor of love and a lot of work for mods too who may be non technical but the work and time they put in is important.
Mastodon is used by me alone and costs ¥1590/month.
Misskey is free with OCI for less than 5 people.
PieFed is ¥491/month.Lemmy is the biggest server in Japan, but I host it at home because it has about 5 MAUs.
(Unfortunately, it is not popular in Japan.)Media is R2, but it is still within the limits of no billing.
¥1590/month.
Rough $11/month in freedom dollars. That’s not bad!
Still pricey for a solo use. What is your use cases? Lurking or a frequent poster?
I probably post frequently.
File servers and multiple BOTs are also running.
It may be a little expensive, but it is a typical amount of money for a VPS that runs Mastodon somewhat comfortably in Japan.
SAKURA internet VPS※Sorry, I’m using machine translation.
Your machine translation is working well.
Yea that seems pretty high. I have a solo pixelfed server that runs around $5 / month. It doesn’t get a lot of use though
Beehaw’s financial update https://beehaw.org/post/15866385
Thanks! Looks like $183.58/372, so $0.49 per user per month
Looking at just the hosting costs is actually a really bad indicator of total costs. The unpaid volunteer time just to run/manage the instance are likely going to be significantly more than the hosting costs if they were compensated even at minimum wage.
Each of the stacks for XXXiver.se and Bestiver.se (Mastodon + Lemmy + Static Site (+ Linkstack/Wiki for XXXiver.se premium)) are shoved into a Hetzner server at ~$13/month, and backed by R2 Object storage.
My current total hosting costs are ~$30/month to host 2xMastodon, 2xLemmy, 2xStatic Site, 1xLinkstack and 1xWiki. This is basically the minimum cost for me to host all of that on their own infra. I have approximately 0 users other than myself yet, so there’s not really a useful cost/user and I can’t really provide info on scaling.
Unlike most others here I’m seeing if I can make hosting into more of a job by selling the full suite of services to communities (e.g. get your own Mastodon + Lemmy + others) or by up-selling to premium accounts. I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money but I’m curious enough to try.
I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money.
Consider yourself lucky if you manage to break even. I am 5 years into this and the Fediverse side of things have been nothing but a money pit. The only thing that is not keeping me completely in the red is the custom Matrix hosting.
Unlike most others here I’m seeing if I can make hosting into more of a job by selling the full suite of services to communities (e.g. get your own Mastodon + Lemmy + others) or by up-selling to premium accounts. I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money but I’m curious enough to try.
FYI, there is https://communick.com/ which offers exactly that. The admin is @rglullis@communick.news
I’ve been curious about going alone on the Fedi but I’ve always been concerned about data storage. How much drive space do you think is required? I presume it accumulates over time.
6.84€ per month. And that’s 6.84€ per user.
Masto admin here. Small instance. 20ish users. costs me about 1€ per user.
Most of the costs comes from media cache storage, so it would scale nicely if I had more users, but I want to keep it small
Cost per month or year?
month
I managed to bring down ani.social’s monthly costs to only ~14 USD when converted (which includes everything except backups). With 165 monthly users, that comes to around ~0.08 USD with a lot of accomodation.
Lemmy is efficient in resources except in storage (database and images) which grows infinitely. Unless you’re purging older posts and images, it keeps growing (very slowly).
Does the image hosting feature use checksums to reduce the amount of duplicate images?
No, I don’t think it removes duplicate images.
sad
How much storage per user per time, would you estimate?
Right now: 0.3GB per user per month. This number is probably much higher for other instances because I don’t keep copies of federated images anymore and I’ve been compressing images early on.
This doesn’t include bandwidth and backups.
That’s pretty high… Leads me to consider hosting an instance on local hardware. I know that’s a whole security mess to deal with, but it night be worthwhile since I have lots of spare storage.
Oh man, I feel like eviltoast.org is on the expensive side of things now. There’s less than 20 mau, but I pay close to $400/mo. Not including object storage or hardware running at home.
Realistically this is hosted on hardware I was already renting for other reasons, so actual cost is zero for lemmy itself. I could probably migrate to a small vm for $20/mo and only lose redundancy.
There’s less than 20 mau, but I pay close to $400/mo.
Wait, what?
It’s infra that was already hosting other things. Lemmy got added to it because there were spare resources in the cluster.
I pay around 80€ per month for the lemmy.ml server, plus a few euros for image hosting and domain. So that’s around 3 cents per active user.
Thank you!
that’s quite low. There must be a lot of barely active users
2.39K monthly active users
4th most active instance (https://fedidb.org/software/lemmy/ )
Hosts 10 of the 100 most active communities (https://lemmy.ca/post/26878531 )
Why is it low? Lemmy scales very well and isn’t resource intensive
It’s lower than every other number I’ve seen in this thread by far
Are you sure? Check again. I didn’t scroll too far, but saw $6, $35, $20, $65 and $30. All are lower.
I meant the cost per user. You can’t really compare total costs
You can compare total better than per user at these scales.
Lemmy needs a certain amount of performance to keep up with federation, but once you have all the images and posts and comments you don’t need second versions until you scale to a size that mandates multiple machines. Which I would guess is more in the 6+ digit user range, where you start averaging requests per second not minute.In some sense, every lemmy user is a user of your instance via federation. You need to pay the performance for all 100k of us whether your instance has 10 or 10k of those. Local users are just a bit extra demanding on your hosting resources.
I suspect the bias we see here with larger instances paying a bit more (50-ish instead of 10-ish) is more due to reliability and snappyness than actual performance needs too. You tend to get optional smaller-gains pricier perks you might not go for for a smaller instance.
For cost per user, it’s only 3 cents. A few others are around 10 cents per user, and the rest are significantly higher.
The instances with lower total cost also have much lower activity, lemmy.ml has 2.4k active users but still only 80€ per month. Impressive.
Looking at the domain name, they’re in Mali. Things must be cheap out there.
They don’t live in Mali, they chose the TLD for its acronym’s meaning
ML became an echo chamber and many have fled.
I have heard it is ban heavy, but it is still quite active in the memes and the Linux communities, and I enjoy both.
If you are interested, there is !linux@programming.dev and !opensource@programming.dev for linux and open source communities which are not on .ml nor .world
I get what’s wrong with .ml. Whats wrond with .world?
Thanks! I like programming.dev and will participate in those more now (however I don’t have a problem with Linux @lemmy.ml. I believe the ban heaviness of lemmy.ml is politically motivated, but that doesn’t effect Linux content much.
Until you mention that you don’t mind select proprietary packages or drivers.
An echo chamber that if you say something they don’t want to hear, you know, like the truth, you catch a ban.
For my single user instance, I can be charitable and say that it’s running on hardware that I already had that is running regardless on spare otherwise unused resources with a already registered domain so the only cost is time spent setting it up. Or I could apply all the costs from the server Lemmy, then it would be about $1200 initially plus ~$10/mo per user.
Good question!
Mine’s a small instance and runs on my existing infrastructure, so my only real cost (aside from a crazy amount of time and stress) is the domain name which is about $20/year.
If I moved it to dedicated infrastructure, I’ve estimated it would cost me about $65/mo for just the backend, UI, and database services (to maintain the same level of performance, anyway. Could probably host it for less and take a performance hit). Object storage for pict-rs would probably be around $10/mo since I force it to use
webpand have a 512 KB limit for user uploads.Ditto
k8s cluster + nix flakes
Thanks for sharing! What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?
What would be the reason to move it to a dedicated infrastructure, you not needing your existing infrastructure?
Yeah, that, or if I decide one day I don’t want to deal with my own hardware anymore. I’ve got a hybrid cloud setup currently, but most of the heavy services run on my own hardware for cost/performance reasons (and I have fiber, so might as well use it lol)
Would you mind sharing your active user count?
its public across the verse at https://fedidb.org
ptz’s for instance (heh) https://fedidb.org/network/instance/dubvee.org
For others, the number is 8 “monthly active users”.
As this instance is partially operating on “free” hardware, it’s unlikely one can host an instance for much cheaper.
For me it’s zero. In addition to reusing existing hardware, I have a subsidized internet connection that I reuse to connect my instance, and even the domain name is free.
Of course I also have fewer users - excluding me, zero.
Here’s the stats for mastodon.world and Lemmy.world
(And a few other fediverse sites)
https://blog.mastodon.world/blog-post-for-august-2024-and-july
Thanks, I remember seeing it some time ago, but it’s a bit hard to really identify how much the Lemmy instance exactly costs
ive purposefully stood up my instance in a production, scalable environment.
i make my costs public on the https://moist.catsweat.com/faq page.
currently running ~1.60/day = 50$/month…
so far about $0.50/per user/month or $1.25/active user/month which should move downward until i hit resource limits and have to scale infrastructure.
From the comments I see, feddit.uk seems to have the lowest unit costs with 11 pennce.
Reminds me of Mary Poppins
Worth also noting that:
- We are currently only using about 1/4 of the resources, so people could trim the cost further (although being over specced helps a lot when there are spikes in activity and it will mean we don’t have to upgrade any time soon).
- Our hosting costs are more that fully covered by around 20 people donating and that should scale with growth (although possibly not in a truly linear way). We also have a decent “warchest” which should see us through most temporary problems.
One reason we break the finances down is because we are a medium-sized instance and we want to demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to run one supported by donations.
If anyone has any questions they are welcome to message me or they can drop it into the monthly financial report (the new one will be next week).
