LavaTech Blog

This is our second financial report to date. We've provided comparisons in this document, but if you'd like to review the 2019 one yourself regardless, you can access it here.

We also released the 2020 transparency report, you can read it here.

This document was mostly written by Ave, but it was reviewed and approved by both LavaTech members.

Income: Patreon

Patreon is our main source of donations for LavaTech.

• In 2020, we made $1028 (minus fees) through Patreon (2019: $563).
• We had no refunds (2019: same).

Before fees, we made $1028.

Expenses: Fees

• $53.00 went to Patreon processing fees (2019: $35.93).
• $51.40 went to Patreon platform fees (2019: $28.15).
• $36.00 went to Payoneer maintenance fees (2019: $11.62).
• $21.62 went to Payoneer (outbound) transaction fees (2019: $9.32).
• $12.00 went to Payoneer (inbound) transaction fees (2019: $6.00).

In total, $172.02 (16.73% of the income) went to taxes and fees in 2020 (2019: $139.78, 29.12%).

Here's a lazy pie chart for your enjoyment:

Expense: Backblaze B2

Backblaze B2 is our preferred data storage service of choice for backups.

• We paid $98.25 to B2 in 2020 (2019: $35.07).
• Our bill fluctuated over the months. We started the year with a $5.89 bill, went up to $13.83 on February, went down to $3.55 on April after we moved lots of old data to cold storage (relevant blog post). We finished the year with a $10.77 bill on December.

Expense: Cloudflare

We started using Cloudflare Load Balancing for Switchroot in July 2019 and stopped in July 2020.

• $12 went to Cloudflare Load Balancing.
• Domain fees from Cloudflare are not included here. You can find them in the domain expenses section of this post.

Expense: Servers

2020 was an interesting year as we've moved from a dedicated server in Hetzner to a colocated server in August.

The new server belongs to Ave, the network and rack belongs to Lasagna Ltd (a company owned by Ave, unrelated to LavaTech). As such, server, network and colocation costs are NOT reflected here.

• We paid €470.70 ($532.58) to Hetzner. (2019: €534.94)
• Most expensive month on Hetzner was July with €49.98 and cheapest months were September, October and November with €20.60. The infrastructure review we did in Q1 2020 also helped with reducing expenses.
• We paid €143.88 (~$171.98) to Online.net (Scaleway Dedibox). All months were €11.99. (2019: €143.88)
• We paid €67.90 (~$81.16) to Scaleway Elements (2019: €55.99).

Note: All of Scaleway was paid directly by Ave. All but 3 months (€35.97) of Online.net were paid by Ave.

In total, we paid €682.48 (~$785.72) for servers in 2020 (2019: €734.81).

Expense: Domains

We bought many cute domains this year.

While we do our best to reflect the correct numbers here, they're not perfect. Stuff like elixi.re domains we pay for renewal of (but don't own yet) aren't included, and we may have forgotten to include some registrars.

Do note that 2019 numbers do not exclude personal purchases while 2020 numbers do.

• We paid $86.85 to Porkbun. (2019: $146.21)
• We paid $27.96 to Dynadot. (2019: $27.46)
• We paid $41.96 to Namecheap (2019: $22.53).
• We paid $16.21 to Cloudflare (2019: $8.03).

In total, we paid $172.98 for domains in 2020 (2019: $228.19).

Expense: KernelCare

We have KernelCare on our main hypervisor, laserjet.

We have a 2 server license, one in use for LavaTech and other in use by our friends at General Programming (which is excluded from the number below). This arrangement allows us to get a slightly favorable per server cost.

During certain parts of the year we bought more licenses temporarily to test other servers and move between servers.

• We paid $46.01 for KernelCare in 2020 (2019: $35.40)

Note: Only one month ($6.90) was paid by LavaTech funds. Rest was paid directly by Ave.

Personal Expenses through LavaTech funds

I (Ave) owe a personal apology here for using the wrong card for one payment. Considering I also paid for a large number of expenses with my own funds, I hope this can be excused.

• $53.53 was paid to General Programming, LLC for helping install servers. (without fees: $53)

In total, we paid $53.53 for personal expenses through LavaTech funds in 2020 (2019: $26.29).

In conclusion

• We made $1028. (2019: $563)
• We got to keep $855.98 of it after fees. (2019: $340.22)
• We spent $1114.96 (doesn't include personal expenses) (2019: $1140.22).
• After fees, %76.77 of our expenses were paid by donations (2019: %29.83).
• Exactly $258.98 was paid out of pocket (2019: $800).

We'd like to thank all of you for supporting us, by using our services, by recommending our services, and by donating domains and funds to our services.

We're closer than ever to being self sustaining, and that makes us unbelievably happy. Thank you so much to everyone who used our services, who recommended our services and those who supported us in any way.

Shameless plug: If you'd like to help make that percentage be higher for 2021, here's our patreon. Anything helps.

(Tags to jump to other related posts: #financialreport #report)