Donations

An update on costs.

tl;dr I was worried for a while that with a few of the annual costs due this month that perhaps our cashflow wasn't healthy, but we're good for now.

This month we've got a few of the heftier costs, wildcard SSL cert for the various domains that help us proxy and cache attachments images as well as serve our API. This is a couple of hundred dollars.

Our email costs seem to be higher than I though too, so I figured it was time to do a boring thing and sit down and work out all costs we face over a year and then to work out the monthly rate from that and figure out whether we're doing OK or not.

The answer is yes, we're still good.

Each year, our total costs are (approx GBP value based on 2016-04-01 USD exchange rate, our bills are exclusively in USD):

£6,337.51

Each month this is:

£528.13

(if this is higher than any figure I previously quoted, I probably wasn't so diligent on tracking the annual costs such as email (some of it is paid annually), domain names, SSL and some of the email costs).

This breaks down (monthly) as:

49.5% Hosting fees: £261.35 (inc' Linode + backups, Tarsnap backups, AWS S3 storage and bandwidth)
28.9% Email fees: £152.74 (inc' Mailgun 50k emails + IP, Mailjet 50k emails + IP, Dmarcian, Google Apps)
14.7% Domain names: £77.79 (inc' all LFGSS domains, and the .sm for Microcosm which is a 1/3 of all domain costs)
4.7% Miscellany: £24.69 (inc' Github and continuous integration fees)
2.2% SSL: £11.55 (RapidSSL wildcard cert)

We currently serve around 270k unique users per month, and are shifting ~600GB traffic from Linode and an additional ~980GB of cached content from CloudFlare.

Which means I can figure out that it costs approx 1p to serve 152 web pages or 5 average visitors over the month.

It's all pretty damn cheap.

On to incomings.

Donations varies month-on-month, affiliate revenue varies month-on-month... costs are pretty stable.

Donations last month were high than normal and come out at £372.51. They were higher than normal because a couple of people made one-off donations above £10.

Affiliate fees last month were £136.82 (Affiliate Window) + £85.40 (Amazon) + £135.40 (eBay) = £357.62

That's an above average Affiliate Window figure which will increase as we head into Spring/Summer and peak around the TdF, it's a much higher Amazon figure (usually we don't get paid because it's way below the £20 threshold) and a predictable lower eBay figure (their decline continues, I expect it to reach zero in the next year or so).

Largely that total figure is kinda stable in the long-run, the slowdown on eBay has so far been made up by additions from Affiliate Window.

Basically wanted to put all that detail out there, show that yes donations do work and are critical. I can't predict affiliate revenue and sometimes it crashes through the floor and sometimes it spikes (like Amazon did this month).

Most months the donations + affiliates hover around the break even point, but sometimes we come out ahead and sometimes we're a bit behind, overall we do break even or come out fractionally ahead.

The extra this month is being sunk into the annualised costs, the SSL certs. Usually I leave it in the PayPal account and it accrues until bills suck it out. So this month we're going to come close to emptying the account, but it's fine... I'm confident that it's just the annualised costs spiking outgoings and not us being in a bad place. My credit card isn't being touched, except for the few providers who don't take PayPal.

Oh, email. We send a hell of a lot more than I thought. Around 1,500 per day on average but occasional spikes of 3-4k per day when something major occurs and more notifications go out. We're now signing all of these using something called DKIM. This is because a lot of spam was being sent in our name, and to stop that I'm now signing everything with DKIM and monitoring it using DMARC.

The changes in emails means that some users may find that they do not receive emails. I've noticed that Apple's servers are least compliant with regards to security, DKIM and DMARC... I've no idea if the emails get through. On Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail things look pretty good now, with all spam sent in our name being outright rejected leaving only the transactional emails we actually do send (via Mailgun) to get through.

That's the very long full transparency, every cost itemised dull update.

And before anyone suggests doing it cheap... we are extraordinarily cheap already for what we do. It may be possible to be cheaper with Google Cloud, but actually that would be to externalise a cost on me to re-write the whole thing for Google Cloud.