LavaTech Financial Report, 2019 edition

What's happening forum?

This is our first financial report to date, due to this, there won't be any data to compare to, but we hope that the data is useful regardless.

We also released a transparency report earlier this week, you can read it here.

This is released on 2020-02-27, with numbers as of this very date.

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.

Graph of Patreon income

After support for other creators, we were left with $480.

Expenses: Taxes and fees

In total, $139.78 (29.12% of the amount that was left after support for other creators) went to taxes and fees in 2019.

Here's a fancy pie chart, because pie charts are good:

Pie chart showing distribution of taxes and fees

Expense: Backblaze B2

Backblaze B2 is our preferred data storage service of choice for backups. As our services and the data we store continue to grow, so does our backup bill. For 2020, I am considering moving old backups to cold storage to accommodate for this.

Expense: Cloudflare

Starting in July, we started hosting switchroot files.

I (ave) made an optimistic move and didn't set up proper RAM caching. Less than 10 seconds after we launched the image files, the server's drives were overloaded, and no one managed to download anything.

As a result, we distributed files to multiple servers and set up Cloudflare Load Balancing (which costs $5/mo), which solved the issue.

Expense: Servers

Obviously, our services require servers. A lot of them, in fact. We have a lot of them for that very reason.

Hetzner is used for most of our server needs and hosts most of our services. Online.net hosts the mirrors, Scaleway hosts (European) 90dns.

All of our server payments are in Euros.

In total, we paid €734.81 (~$803.80) for servers in 2019.

Expense: Domains

And obviously, what good is an image host without domains?

Do note that these numbers aren't perfect, as lines somewhat blur between LavaTech domain costs (like elixi.re) and non-LavaTech domain costs (like ave.zone). I've however left out registrars that I only have non-LavaTech domains from, such as nictr (now metunic).

In total, we paid $228.19 for domains in 2019.

Expense: HIBP

We had a HIBP API subscription for 3 months to be used with our bitwarden server, so we paid $10.5 (+$0.18 payoneer fees) to that.

Expense: KernelCare

We have KernelCare on our main hypervisor, edgebleed. We try to keep downtime to a minimum, and kcare helps with that.

We get a 2 server license, so we pay $2.95/mo per server, but as one of them is used by our friends at General Programming, it's not included in this specific report.

Personal Expenses through LavaTech funds: G Suite, Steam

These were expenses we made for ourselves, and were rare. We are trying to keep these to a minimum. Considering we pay a significant chunk of the LavaTech expenses from pocket, we hope that they'll be excused.

These numbers include payoneer fees.

In total, we paid $26.29 for personal expenses through LavaTech funds in 2019.

In conclusion

Also, another pie chart, this time showing expenses (somewhat outdated, doesn't include kernelcare):

Pie chart showing distribution of expenses

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.

Shameless plug: If you'd like to help make that percentage be higher for 2020, here's our patreon. Anything helps.

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