Ohai folks! We’ve been working on a longer blog post for a while now—it will outline things like our moderation policies and future plans for the ohai.social server. As is often the case with these things, it’s taking a little longer to finish than we would have liked. In the meantime, here’s a quick update on the state of our Patreon and our running costs.
Our Patreon has grown to 95 backers and €265 in monthly donations. Thank you so much for your continued support. It means the world to us and helps us keep ohai.social running and free for everyone! After Patreon and Paypal fees, this translates to about €230 in our bank account.
On the cost side, we’re currently looking at about €580/month in expenses as of January 2023. These can be broken down to:
- Cloud hosting: ~€550;
- Media storage: €26.05 (1302 GB * €0.02);
- Email delivery (SES): $1.23.
In addition, there are a number of smaller fees that are paid annually. These include domain registration ($37.44/year) and DMCA agent registration ($6/year).
After the huge influx of people in November and December, signups and overall activity have slowly stabilized at a more sustainable level. As most of our infrastructure is scalable, we can slowly adjust things to lower our expenses, and we expect total costs to be around €500 starting February.
Parts of our infrastructure will still be a bit “oversized”. But that way we will be ready for the inevitable next drama on the bird site that causes tons of people to sign up to Mastodon again (Without having to spend hours working on servers in the middle of the night, anyway).