Possible Membership Tiers for Fediverse Servers
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I am working on finalizing the revenue plan for our new fediverse servers. Since we are using Hubzilla, we have more features to offer, so that has to be taken into consideration. A big difference is that Hubzilla can offer cloud storage for your files, images, videos, etc. So we have to consider how much space do we give people. We also have to consider that we won't sell your data and won't display ads, so we can't and won't use those as revenue sources.
We are thinking of using a membership model, where the community supports the server through membership fees, but still have a free tier for those who can't afford it, or who want to to try it out first. And then offering managed hosting for those who want more cloud storage or who want their own domain name.
Since Hubzilla supports Nomadic Identity, you can still use our domain name for your channel, even if you get your own hosting. For example, you might want [email protected] as your handle. Or you might want to backup your data by having it on your server and ours at the same time, since Hubzilla can sync data.
Right now I am thinking there will be three options:
1. Free - Zero or almost no cloud storage.
2. Supporter - 1 GB of cloud storage - $25/year
3. Your Own Server with 20GB or more of cloud storage starting at $75/year (200 GB cloud storage at $99/year; 1 TB for $159/year; etc.)
After we launch and see the number of people signing up, we can adjust the prices and storage sizes.
Do you think those tiers and prices are reasonable? I probably should charge more considering the server costs, but I want to keep it affordable. -
@scott how many paying members are you expecting to get at this price point?
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@Raphael Lullis Based on random comments by other platforms, somewhere between 1% and 10% decide to contribute money to a fediverse server.
To be safe, let's estimate 1% decide to upgrade to a paid plan. -
@Raphael Lullis Based on random comments by other platforms, somewhere between 1% and 10% decide to contribute money to a fediverse server.
To be safe, let's estimate 1% decide to upgrade to a paid plan. -
If we buy storage space in bulk and have at least 1% choose a paid plan, I probably would be able to provide 1 GB for free users and 10 GB for members. For more space, we'd give them their own virtual server with their own domain or subdomain. But this pricing leaves little for other costs, like labor. We'd really need more than 1% to upgrade or else we would need donations to cover the rest.
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If we buy storage space in bulk and have at least 1% choose a paid plan, I probably would be able to provide 1 GB for free users and 10 GB for members. For more space, we'd give them their own virtual server with their own domain or subdomain. But this pricing leaves little for other costs, like labor. We'd really need more than 1% to upgrade or else we would need donations to cover the rest.
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@Raphael Lullis Our goal is to match or surpass Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Loops. It'd say our stretch goal is 1 million users, with a minimum of a 1% upgrade rate.
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@Raphael Lullis Our goal is to match or surpass Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Loops. It'd say our stretch goal is 1 million users, with a minimum of a 1% upgrade rate.
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So: 10k paying customers. Assuming $50/year/customer, that's $500k in yearly revenue. What about operating costs? Surely serving 1m users will require a good amount of servers/bandwidth/storage/backup?
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@Raphael Lullis We will start small and scale up, but we need to plan ahead.
According to a recent post from @Daniel Supernault ⁂ it is costing them about $4000 a month ($48,000 a year) in hosting costs for multiple websites. He has Loops, Pixelfed, and several other sites. He is only up to about 250,000 active users, and 350,000 total users. Note that the $4000 a month does not include labor costs and overhead.
#^https://loves.tech/display/24f45628-71e8-515b-8dd0-cd208c7b70dd
#^https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113887622931474663
According to his post, he is only getting about $1,465 from Patreon, so donations are not cutting it. Although his crowdfunding campaign seems to be doing well. That is why we are looking into other ways to fund the servers.
We could host one single Hubzilla instance with 24 GB of RAM, 400% of virtual CPUs, and 5 TB of total disk space for less than $100 per month or less than $1200 per year, if you include taxes. Storage space costs about $1 for 200 GB.
The questions are: How many users will fit on this configuration? And how much space will each user use? How many people will upgrade to a paid plan? How much labor will be required to maintain the servers and how big of a staff do we need?
We don't know the answers to those questions with precision yet.
We do know that active users typically use anywhere between 1 GB to 20 GB of space just for messaging alone, not including cloud storage. So cloud storage would be on top of that. So if we give them 10 GB of cloud storage, we have to assume 20 GB of total space used by that user. Although many users will use less than that and some will use more.
We also know the exact cost for hosting small instances of Hubzilla, and that starts as low as $5.95 a month and storage space hovers around $1 for 200 GB.
And we also know that labor is expensive and grocery stores don't take volunteer time on open source for payment. So the goal is that channel excess funds back into development of the open source software.
Basically, we will have to do a soft launch at introductory prices, and see what people do. We can then use that data to refine the pricing and features people get. -
@Raphael Lullis We will start small and scale up, but we need to plan ahead.
According to a recent post from @Daniel Supernault ⁂ it is costing them about $4000 a month ($48,000 a year) in hosting costs for multiple websites. He has Loops, Pixelfed, and several other sites. He is only up to about 250,000 active users, and 350,000 total users. Note that the $4000 a month does not include labor costs and overhead.
#^https://loves.tech/display/24f45628-71e8-515b-8dd0-cd208c7b70dd
#^https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113887622931474663
According to his post, he is only getting about $1,465 from Patreon, so donations are not cutting it. Although his crowdfunding campaign seems to be doing well. That is why we are looking into other ways to fund the servers.
We could host one single Hubzilla instance with 24 GB of RAM, 400% of virtual CPUs, and 5 TB of total disk space for less than $100 per month or less than $1200 per year, if you include taxes. Storage space costs about $1 for 200 GB.
The questions are: How many users will fit on this configuration? And how much space will each user use? How many people will upgrade to a paid plan? How much labor will be required to maintain the servers and how big of a staff do we need?
We don't know the answers to those questions with precision yet.
We do know that active users typically use anywhere between 1 GB to 20 GB of space just for messaging alone, not including cloud storage. So cloud storage would be on top of that. So if we give them 10 GB of cloud storage, we have to assume 20 GB of total space used by that user. Although many users will use less than that and some will use more.
We also know the exact cost for hosting small instances of Hubzilla, and that starts as low as $5.95 a month and storage space hovers around $1 for 200 GB.
And we also know that labor is expensive and grocery stores don't take volunteer time on open source for payment. So the goal is that channel excess funds back into development of the open source software.
Basically, we will have to do a soft launch at introductory prices, and see what people do. We can then use that data to refine the pricing and features people get. -
Raphael Lullisreplied to Scott M. Stolz last edited by [email protected]
I think the key question I'd have is the one you are still figuring out the answer: given a deployment of a hubzilla server with a configuration, how many users can you serve?
E.g, how small is the $6/month "small instance"? Can it work with 10 users? 100? 3? And what happens when the average user follows 100 other people on the Fediverse? And what happens if one of these users follows a bunch of media heavy content? What would happen if one popular user is followed by 2M people?
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@Raphael Lullis Another goal is to offload users with heavy usage onto their own servers. This makes costs more predictable and also aligns with our goals to decentralize social media. It also means that they get administrator access to their own servers, and can configure it how they want.
So when I say a stretch goal of 1 million, I don't want all of them on the same server. I mean total Hubzilla users, some on our flagship servers, some using our @TechSero hosting, some using other hosting providers like @K&T Host , and some self-hosting at using @YunoHost.
The goal is to create an ecosystem that attracts users but also promotes decentralization. -
@Raphael Lullis Another goal is to offload users with heavy usage onto their own servers. This makes costs more predictable and also aligns with our goals to decentralize social media. It also means that they get administrator access to their own servers, and can configure it how they want.
So when I say a stretch goal of 1 million, I don't want all of them on the same server. I mean total Hubzilla users, some on our flagship servers, some using our @TechSero hosting, some using other hosting providers like @K&T Host , and some self-hosting at using @YunoHost.
The goal is to create an ecosystem that attracts users but also promotes decentralization. -
@Raphael Lullis That is the tricky part. Usage by users vary greatly.
A small instance starts at $5.95 with 2 GB RAM, 20 GB of space, and 100% CPU, which gives you 50 processes. For $1 more, you can upgrade to 200 GB of disk space.
Based on usage on existing servers, that is sufficient for dozens of channels with average usage, or 1 user with very high usage. It probably could handle much more, but most of the servers we have as examples have less then 12 users on them, so we don't know the maximum it can hold.
This might be a good idea for a test. I can set up one of our servers and clone a bunch of accounts on it, and see how it fares. -
@Raphael Lullis That is the tricky part. Usage by users vary greatly.
A small instance starts at $5.95 with 2 GB RAM, 20 GB of space, and 100% CPU, which gives you 50 processes. For $1 more, you can upgrade to 200 GB of disk space.
Based on usage on existing servers, that is sufficient for dozens of channels with average usage, or 1 user with very high usage. It probably could handle much more, but most of the servers we have as examples have less then 12 users on them, so we don't know the maximum it can hold.
This might be a good idea for a test. I can set up one of our servers and clone a bunch of accounts on it, and see how it fares. -
FYI: each reply from you is generating multiple repeated responses, (presumably) one for each identity you have set up?
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Yeah, you definitely need to synthesize some type of benchmark. There is no other way to answer the question "what do you think of this pricing strategy?" if you have no idea about your costs.
If you'd like to have some kind of load test, maybe you could set up an instance that mirrors 100k random active Instagram accounts and see what happens both with your instance and the network?
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@Raphael Lullis
FYI: each reply from you is generating multiple repeated responses, (presumably) one for each identity you have set up?
That is because ActivityPub does not support nomadic identity (although there is an FEP for it). As such, Mastodon does not realize that all of those are the same channel and the same post.
This is one benefit of Hubzilla and Zot Protocol. You can clone your channel on as many servers as you want, but users will only get one copy of all of your posts, and also will be notified of your primary server.
My primary channel is [email protected] and I would recommend following that one. You can unfollow all of the others since they are duplicates or clones of [email protected].
Until ActivityPub and Mastodon recognize nomadic identity, this will continue to be an issue, unfortunately. -
@Raphael Lullis
FYI: each reply from you is generating multiple repeated responses, (presumably) one for each identity you have set up?
That is because ActivityPub does not support nomadic identity (although there is an FEP for it). As such, Mastodon does not realize that all of those are the same channel and the same post.
This is one benefit of Hubzilla and Zot Protocol. You can clone your channel on as many servers as you want, but users will only get one copy of all of your posts, and also will be notified of your primary server.
My primary channel is [email protected] and I would recommend following that one. You can unfollow all of the others since they are duplicates or clones of [email protected].
Until ActivityPub and Mastodon recognize nomadic identity, this will continue to be an issue, unfortunately.
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