"In 2024, it cost $N to run a Mastodon instance with ~1000 active users for a year. By the end of 2025, that figure had dropped to $0.5N, due to the launch of X, Y, Z."
What are X, Y, and Z?
In terms of cost, consider systems administration and moderation as paid work, even if the admin is not paying themselves for either of these things.
@mekkaokereke current estimates of yearly cost per account is $0.30 to $0.80 based on infrastructure, storage, etc. From what I've seen.
I'm pretty sure @esk or @dma worked out the numbers for Hachyderm too.
@thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma yup, we could calc the raw infra costs, will do latest tonight, but your range sounds about right.
i'm not aware of anything that would have magically dropped the infra costs (the x, y, nor z). maybe the libvips support reduced cpu somewhat.
mekka has a super key point - the people costs are all $0 in that figure, though, bc it's volunteer. personally, i'm happy to do it as a way of giving back, but reality is, mastodon is hard to make viable if you actually pay people.
@thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma so stats, based on dec 2024 exit run rate (rounded for simplicity):
#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
orders of magnitude of difference.
we could argue about the staff size - i went with roughly what we have today and assumed we made everyone full time so they could hachy for 32/hr/wk vs. calculating the number of hours we actually work. e.g. maybe we could it out at ~$4.50/user/mo, but still a multiple orders of magnitude bump from the raw infra cost.
@esk @mekkaokereke @dma we're definitely not all working 32/hr/wk on hachyderm.. but that number rises and falls as we work on things, it's not continuous
@thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma yup - since this was esk's hypothetical dream staffing model where we can do many great things for the hachyderm, i modeled it after what i'd consider a minimally viable team running a globally available production service. imo, that's eight people so there's sufficient degrees of freedom to take on 1-3 epics, have a reasonable oncall rotation, and provide plenty of space for holidays, contribute to upstream mastodon/other projects, etc.
could we do it with one or two people, sure. but that isn't a team.
@esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke so if every active user gave us $5 a month we'd be pretty close to staffing a team.
that's surprisingly achievable. time to run some "for the price of a coffee month..." banners!
in case it's not clear I'm not suggesting this for realsies, but I am pleasantly surprised by how little, relatively, it would take to start paying folks for their time.
@dma@hachyderm.io @esk@hachyderm.io @thisismissem@hachyderm.io @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io you know, this really puts the old "twitter doesn't make any money" arguments into perspective (in that their argument wasn't that Twitter doesn't make any money so much as it was "Twitter doesn't make money hand over fist for the capitalist backers like they want it to").
I still hear some variation about "fedi needs monetization!" and my first instinct is no, for a ton of reasons, but it's also nice to know that in theory, things can work out just fine and people can get paid for their time without forcing advertising or VC backing down people's throats.
Facts.
The above post is much deeper and more profound than it might seem.
I want people to read it again, and really understand it.
When an Open Source or volunteer based initiative offers a similar service to a VC backed startup or publicly traded company, the odds can seem insurmountable, because the VC backed company budgets are astronomical. But... their budgets also include the need to both generate profit, and to grow at an exponential rate.
Customer acquisition is *usually* very expensive. But if you don't also have that same need to generate profit, or grow at an exponential rate, then you can operate at a similar quality, for a fraction of the cost.
"
But you have to believe that all this is true, to fully unlock your mind to then believe that you can create something of similar quality. Because if you don't truly believe this, then you instead tell yourself things like, "I don't deserve good UX in my product, because I don't have $200MM in funding." This is self-defeating excuse making.
Mastodon is a unique "business" in that its customer acquisition cost is effectively negative.
Because the most successful Mastodon marketing campaigns, are negative "customer attrition campaigns
@mekkaokereke @aud @thisismissem @esk @dma i think about this sometimes, there seem to be a lot of examples of "industry leader has left a huge market void for a functioning version of their product" these days