An interesting blog post came out from the folks over at Waitlist: they listed their tech stack and how much it cost them to run it. Turns our that in their case it is less than USD 600 per month, which isn’t much. Good for them.
Which led us to think about how much we, too, spend every month to Keep the Kiwi going. Below is the list of services we use, and their monthly breakdown:
- Apple developer: $9.08
- Asana: $0.00
- Borgbase: $18.00
- Cyon: $14.25
- Donorbox: $0.69
- Figma: $0.00
- Freshdesk: $0.00
- Gandi: $0.00
- Grafana: $29.00
- ghcr.io: $0.00
- Github: $5.00
- Google workspace: $0.00
- Google play: $0.00
- Hubspot: $0.00
- Kibana: $0.00
- Mailgun: $0.00
- Mailpoet: $0.00
- Matomo: $0.00
- Microsoft store: $0.00
- Mirrorbrain: $0.00
- Ory: $15.00
- Scaleway: $363.00
- Sourceforge: $0.00
- Stripe Gateway: $12.00
- TeamGantt: $0.00
- Translatewiki: $0.00
- Uptimerobot: $7.00
- Wasabi: $64.50
- WPML: $8.25
We clearly weren’t expecting using 29 different services when we started the list. For an outlet who last year provided internet content to about 10 million people without internet access, it is kind of ironic that we should be so reliant on cloud-based services.
It is also interesting to note that as we grow, so do our needs: Grafana (a tool to monitor infrastructure metrics) was added this year, as well as ghcr.io (as a replacement to Docker when those seriously dented their FOSS credentials).
On this note, quick shout-out to the folks at Gandi, Ory and Scaleway, who got us massive discounts on their products because 1. we are non-profit 2. run open-source software and 3. we asked nicely. They all walked the extra mile one way or the other, and their service is flawless. If you need to run your enterprise-level infrastructure somewhere – go there (and no, they did not ask us to post this).
Second, and probably most important: this tells us that just to keep Kiwix around and available for download we need about $545 per month. Without all the discounts and freebies we would be somewhere in the 1,500 range each month ($18,000 per year). Considering that last year about 8-10 million people were using Kiwix, that comes to less that .2 cents per user. Not too shabby.
But, what are the big spends, and why are those only the tip of the iceberg?
Scaleway / Wasabi
Those are the servers. They run the imager, the zimfarm, zimit – because the zim format is a highly compressed one, this takes a lot of calculation… and thus computing power. Crawling and compressing 6,700,000 articles, their internal links and images into a single, 97 Gb archive requires about 120 hours of non-stop computation. Not all our zim files are the same, but we nevertheless churn out a few thousand each month. And they are big, hence their hosting at Wasabi.
We also get computing donations from supportive folks (thanks to them!) which helps reduce the bill somewhat. If you have an underused server lying around that is connected to the internet, and want to help by sharing some of its time, here is the how. If you are more into mirroring content, go this way.
Yes, but
We try to be conservative when deploying new software, mostly because 1) that takes time, and therefore resources that cannot be used elsewhere and 2) we make sure that we really need something before signing up for it (lest we end up doing more maintenance than actual development). We did end up declining an offer to join an Amazon S3 sponsorship program because their offer did not cover our main cost center (compute). and managing the transfer from our existing service would have been too time-consuming to be worth the effort. It was, in fact, cheaper to keep a paid service.
And this is the crux of the matter: software is only one side of our maintenance costs, the other being of course the people used to install, setup and run these platforms. Our kubernetes setup had 165 deployments / fixes over the past 18 months, meaning that people had to write that code and push it. Human costs are a little more complicated to estimate as we have no dedicated infrastructure person, but the bottom line here is that salaries will always run a multiple of machine costs.
Kiwix has no ads, nor does it resell user data: we rely on donations, so if you would like to help us help others (or simply help cover the costs listed above), feel free to pitch in.