Oh goodness, wake me up when this post is written, please. Money bores me senseless. However as some who is seeking donations I feel it’s my duty to be transparent about what those donations are being used for. Despite the fact that when the AWS monthly bill comes in I kinda dread reading it.
Anyway, yesterday I mustered the willpower to update my spreadsheet of costs over time. It was a bit terrifying.
Costs rose very dramatically in October. That was when I had the hardware failure and did the lift and shift to get the old site running in the cloud. As that required a new EC2 (virtual server) and RDS (database), I knew there would be increased costs. Everything else is pretty stable though, but I will keep an eye on DynamoDB and data transfer, as they are increasing.
The site is now costing me in the order of $A170 per month (note that the graph above is in $US, and it’s about $US1 = $A1.5), which is almost enough motivation to do something about. Other bits of life are getting in the way though, such as a terminally old dog and so on.
On July 1, which is the start of the new tax year in Australia, I took a payout from Patreon of all the money that was there, and it was $A69.92. I declared that on my tax as I am required to do. And thanks to all of my lovely patrons for helping me! Patreonage has continued to increase slowly – it would probably help if I worked on the site a bit more – so that’s looking good.
I would like to get rid of the lifted and shifted site. I’ve had report it’s too slow anyway, and it would cost more to make it faster. However there’s an experiment I’d like to conduct on it – to migrate it to new database technology that scales better and could possibly be cheaper. It would be informative to me to see how well that goes.
Oh well, the site is not making me rich. However if I have to spend long months locked away from the world due to a COVID-19 outbreak, I’ll have plenty to do. Thank you all for your support.
Thank you
So, the _annual_ Patreon income covers less than half the _monthly_ expenditure for the site?
I gotta say, I really wish this site at least wasn’t making you poor… 😢
What does the site traffic look like? Would ads on the site provide any significant revenue? Would ads in combination with a Patreon support level for not seeing ads help?
Well, once I stop hosting the old site in the cloud, costs will drop a lot. This was just the first year of the Patreon, and it has been climbing slowly. I can certainly cope with it for the moment.
I did try putting ads on the site, but got rejected. It was possibly because I didn’t have a lot of content and wasn’t attracting many users at the time, but in any case the Google automated systems are pretty crap to deal with. Computer says no. I’d rather write my own advertising functionality and sell direct to publishers / designers. But that takes time.
My job has been hit pretty hard by the pandemic, so I may have some more time in the coming months to get some things sorted.