Instance admins, how much does it cost you to run your instance? How much does that represent per active user?

Question triggered by the other post about instances shutting down due to costs

Summary of the answers:

lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
obviously single user instance have higher costs

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98 comments

Good question!
Mine's a small instance and runs on my existing infrastructure, so my only real cost (aside from a crazy amount of unpaid 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 webp and have a 512 KB limit for user uploads.
Those numbers may be a little high, but they're based on my existing VPS provider which has amazing SLAs and uptime.
- 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 infrastructure currently, and most of the heavy services (DB mostly) 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.
- Ditto
  k8s cluster + nix flakes

98 comments