2026-05-01: Platform cost analytics

Announcements
1

In addition to our quarterly platform analytics, which focus on user and repository metrics, we have now also explored the financial side to produce a report.

The aim is to give users an overview of what it costs to run the platform, how the money is spent, and how much funding is coming in through donations via Liberapay (thanks to every sponsor!).

Bar plot of monthly costs and donations
Bar plot of monthly costs and donations1500Ă—750 18.4 KB

A few notes about this graph:

  • Our current resources on PROD are way larger than what we currently would require. As of May 2026, CF currently has around 500 registered users and around 50-100 active ones. With the current stack, we should likely be able to host multiple ten thousand users without any performance degradation. We invested in a suite of bare-metal servers for PROD right from the start for a future-proof setup.
  • The increase in cost over the last month is mainly due to the expansion of our Kubernetes cluster which hosts internal monitoring apps and the renovate operator
  • Hetzner has announced a price increase of around 30% starting in May 2026, so we expect the costs for the next month to go up to around 3xx/month or even 4xx/month
  • Our main arm64 CI node, a Mac Mini M4, is not included in the costs above as it was a one-time purchase
  • S3 storage costs are still missing and will be added in a future version
  • The donations are only an estimate because there is no clear start and end date for each donation and the effective payment isn’t always happening on a daily/monthly base but in different intervals set by the individual donating entities

Please also see our general take on financial sustainability from our docs.

4 Likes
2

So, assuming costs stabilize soon but donations continue to increase, it seems reasonable to assume break-even might be reached fairly soon. That’s exciting!

3

Yes, let’s see how it goes but we’re positive that we’re moving into the right direction. With a “reasonable” use of both repo storage and CI we shouldn’t have any issues serving a lot users while keeping the overall platform costs below/at around 500 for the foreseeable future and below 1k for a long time.

Once donations exceed the costs, we can add more hardware (if needed). With more users, the need for CI machines will increase. However, the servers we use for it (64GB+) can take quite some load, so we shouldn’t have the need to add that many in the near future.

And if there’s still some donation overhead after this, the people administrating the platform get their fair distributed share.