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

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Are you sure? Check again. I didn't scroll too far, but saw $6, $35, $20, $65 and $30. All are lower.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago

For cost per user, it's only 3 cents. A few others are around 10 cents per user, and the rest are significantly higher.

The instances with lower total cost also have much lower activity, lemmy.ml has 2.4k active users but still only 80€ per month. Impressive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I meant the cost per user. You can't really compare total costs

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

You can compare total better than per user at these scales.
Lemmy needs a certain amount of performance to keep up with federation, but once you have all the images and posts and comments you don't need second versions until you scale to a size that mandates multiple machines. Which I would guess is more in the 6+ digit user range, where you start averaging requests per second not minute.

In some sense, every lemmy user is a user of your instance via federation. You need to pay the performance for all 100k of us whether your instance has 10 or 10k of those. Local users are just a bit extra demanding on your hosting resources.

I suspect the bias we see here with larger instances paying a bit more (50-ish instead of 10-ish) is more due to reliability and snappyness than actual performance needs too. You tend to get optional smaller-gains pricier perks you might not go for for a smaller instance.