the February 2024 Beehaw Financial Update
the February 2024 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. you can donate here.
overall expenses for January: $212.04
$139.16 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into
- $112.00 for hosting the site itself
- $22.40 for backups
- $4.76 for site snapshots
$28.80 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
- $0.00 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)
$4.92 for BackBlaze, (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)
- we internally flagged this because we don't have an explanation for why this is so low this month--but, as far as we can tell it lines up with what it "should" be, so...
overall contributions in the past month: $696.59
- we received a single $193.32 one-time donation, while the remaining $503.27 was monthly
total end of year balance: $6,781.73
expense runway, assuming no further donations
- assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about two years and seven months of runway
finance history
| October | November | December | January | February | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Contributions | $691.85 | $596.28 | $660.43 | $562.79 | $696.59 |
| Expenses | $230.81 | $231.54 | $229.09 | $230.68 | $212.04 |
| Difference | +$461.04 | +$364.74 | +$431.34 | +$332.11 | +$484.55 |
| Balance | $5,198.47 | $5,470.13 | $5,926.29 | $6,290.06 | $6,781.73 |
It gives me warm fuzzies to see that balance going up, while at least maintaining current services. Thanks for putting it together Alyaza.
Impressive, well done!
I hate money and wish it did not exist but I'm glad we're doing OK. Thank you Beehaw
Outstanding transparency. Few user-funded websites provide month-to-month financial reports.
If I may ask for my curiosity…
Can you describe how the hosting is set up?
Is it a single VM? Or are you running 2 or more VMs and utilizing a load balancer? If not, do you not yet see a need to do so?
I will say the uptime these past couple months has been amazing. I know with the influx last summer and the updates to Lemmy, things were a bit rocky at times, but I appreciate the work you all have done to stabilize the site.
Thank you all for working to make a stable, safe, and inclusive space!
Thanks for noticing and the kudos. I still owe @Phrey@lemmy.sdf.org and @TheMadnessKing@lemdro.id a write up on a few things Beehaw. The main differences between the Reddit influx and today, are the user numbers are lower now, and a lot of optimizations for the various moving pieces.
Right now Beehaw is on one beefy VPS, same server for frontend, backend and database. Load balancing the front end was happening for a while, but really didn't have any improvements over a single one due to the DB handling anyway. I'm exploring a few different methods to get Beehaw load balanced and especially a more resilient database structure, but don't want to increase the cost 10 fold. That's another 4 posts worth of info though.
Thanks for the info!!
Holy shit, I'm new to beehaw and I've never seen anything like this on any other platform.
Very well done @alyaza!
this is very belated but we will go back to doing these, we're just in the middle of transferring our finances to a new host and that's eaten up several months