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Are monthly costs still circa £600?
Just above.
About a year ago it was closer to £700 but then currency exchange moved in our favour and the costs declined again.
Our costs are largely static in $ and € and fluctuate according to the exchange rate. And it's not a smooth fluctuation as our costs are made up of lots of suppliers (TarSnap, AWS, Linode, Gandi, etc). The £ amount has swung whilst the actual costs are stable.
As a guide, it costs just over £600 per month to run when ammortized over the year... but some months are actually around £500 and some months around £900 (depending on when domain renewals and TLS certificates are renewed). Donations are around £500 per month with some occasional larger ones, and the overall difference still being made up by a bit of eBay and Chain Reaction Cycles affiliates. We have 2 other donors outside of LFGSS who contribute, Islington Cycling Club donate a monthly amount and Brixton Cycles made a large one-off donation in January that saw us comfortably through January.
Precarious but liveable.
We have just over a month and a bit in the bank but have already fully paid this month so logically this is about 2 months worth of runway. I don't ring any klaxons until it's below 1 month or I notice that I'm subsidising it with my credit card.
A lot of people rolled off their subscription or cancelled it in the Jan-Mar period. Probably a combination of expired cards, pressures of post-Christmas personal finances, and a few people no longer using the forum and cancelling their subscriptions.
It's all still OK... could be healthier but could definitely be a lot worse. The first part of the year is typically the worst for donations and forum finances, so it being quiet in this period isn't some exception. I'll wait to see if it picks up in any way over the next couple of months before getting concerned.
It's manageable. And even the 30MB image storage size isn't hurting the AWS costs either... so all doing OK today.