Esk - Cost of running Hachyderm

2025-01-09

#hachyderm costs about $1600/mo to run. this is up somewhat, as we've started to add some infra as part of our resilience plan announced in nov.

we currently have about:

• 55000 users
• 9700 MAU
• 3.7M toots

yielding:

• $.03/user/mo
• $.16/active user/mo
• $.0004/toot

from a raw compute & storage perspective.

again, this is based on 100% volunteer work. today, our mods and infra folk graciously donate their time to keep this thing going.

hypothetically, if we paid them, say, $120k USD/yr (chose this to make the math cleaner), that would add $10k/person/mo to the cost.

if we go with a staff of eight (mix of mod & infra), that adds $80k/mo to the run rate, for a total of $81,600/mo, yielding:

• $1.48/user/mo
• $8.41/active user/mo
• the toot figure is silly, so i'm not calculating it again :blobfoxlaugh:

orders of magnitude of difference. Link

Infrastructure cost per user is fairly low. As far as I know they're using cost-effective providers but they're also using way more than the bare minimum infrastructure to achieve better availability and performance.

Adding (hypotetical in the Hachyderm case) staff compensation drastically raises costs but it still feels reasonable. I wonder how many active users a staff of 8 (across moderation and infrastructure) could serve.

In case you want to contribute: funding Hachyderm.