LavaTech Blog

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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.

• This document was edited on 2020-03-12 to add KernelCare fees. Similarly, title was changed from 2020 to 2019, because calling it 2020 was a bad idea.

Income: Patreon

Patreon is our main source of donations for LavaTech.

• In 2019, we made $563 (minus taxes and fees) through Patreon.
• We had no refunds.
• $83.00 went to supporting other creators (I sadly cannot find a way to pull up a list of who they were, however as of November 2019, we aren't paying for our Patreon patronage through LavaTech).
• Starting in June, we started using Payoneer for server payments to be able to use a debit card.
• Before June, we were using Luna's Paypal, but we had to switch away due to Brazilian Paypal banning the use of balance internationally.
• Move to Payoneer introduced further fees.

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

Expenses: Taxes and fees

• $36.76 went to VAT.
• $35.93 went to Patreon processing fees.
• $28.15 went to Patreon platform fees.
• $12.00 went to activating out Payoneer debit card.
• $11.62 went to Payoneer maintenance fees.
• $9.32 went to Payoneer (outbound) transaction fees.
• $6.00 went to Payoneer (inbound) transaction 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:

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.

• $35.07 went to B2.
• While we paid $0.78 on January, we paid $5.17 on December.
• (Informational) We paid $6.43 on February 2020.

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.

• $27.26 went to Cloudflare Load Balancing.
• Domain fees from Cloudflare is not included here.

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.

• €534.94 (~$585.15) went to Hetzner.
• Cheapest months on Hetzner were April to July, with each month costing €40.85.
• Most expensive months on Hetzner was December, costing €49.57.
• €143.88 (~$157.45) went to Online.net. All months were €11.99.
• €55.99 (~$61.26) went to Scaleway.

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).

• $146.21 went to Porkbun.
• $27.46 went to Dynadot.
• $23.96 went to Namesilo (As of 2020, we are no longer working with Namesilo).
• $22.53 went to Namecheap.
• $8.03 went to Cloudflare.

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.

• $35.40 was spent for KernelCare in 2019 ($2.95/mo).

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.

• $5.97 was spent on Steam
• $20.32 was spent on G Suite

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

In conclusion

• We made $563.
• We got to keep $340.22 of it after fees, taxes and support towards other creators.
• We spent $1140.22 (doesn't include personal expenses).
• After fees, taxes and support towards other creators, 29.83% of our expenses were paid by donations. Exactly $800 was paid out of pocket.

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

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)