TL;DR: This month, the total operating cost of the https://vernissage.photos platform was $458.44, of which $181.78 was contributed by patrons. Thank you very much for every contribution!
Below is a detailed financial report for the operation of https://vernissage.photos during the month of April 2026. The report is broken down by individual service providers whose services are essential to keeping the platform running.
Amazon (S3 + CloudFront)
Vernissage uses Amazon S3 to store all user files and relies on Amazon CloudFront - a content delivery network (CDN) - to distribute those files quickly and reliably across the internet.
- Total storage used: 781.3 GB
- Total number of files: 2,674,893
- Total cost: $80.14
As you can see, the amount of data stored in S3 continues to grow steadily. In April, 60GB of new data was added. Since some older data was deleted, the actual amount of newly uploaded data was certainly even higher.
I was very surprised, however, when I saw the Amazon bill. Until now, I had been paying around $20 per month, but this time the bill was $80. When I opened the AWS Console, I saw something that genuinely shocked me.
For the first time, Amazon charged me for CloudFront. I have been using this service for well over a year, and it had never appeared in the cost breakdown before. I am not sure why this happened, especially since Amazon itself shows that Vernissage had already been exceeding the free usage tier for some time:
It is possible that we exceeded some other limit. I simply do not know why the increase was so large all at once, as AWS does not provide a detailed usage report for March. To avoid being surprised by this situation again, I changed the CloudFront plan from Pay-as-you-Go to the Pro plan. We now have a fairly large usage buffer, and the cost is $15 per month. This is a better option than paying an additional $60 every month. The usage allowance we now have is shown below.
Below, I am also including the detailed CloudFront usage statistics for April.
The amount of data transfer and the number of requests generated by Vernissage are clearly impressive. I also expect them to continue growing steadily as the number of users increases.
Fly.io
For April, the cost of Fly.io services was similar to March. The size of the services there was not changed. I assume, however, that this will eventually have to change, and sooner or later we will need to move from shared services to performance services. That, unfortunately, will significantly increase costs, which are already quite substantial.
- Total cost: $377.29
Here’s a breakdown of the services currently in use:
| Name | Type | RAM | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| push | shared-cpu-1x | 512MB | 2 machines |
| web | shared-cpu-2x | 1024MB | 2 machines |
| api | shared-cpu-4x | 2048MB | 2 machines |
| jobs | shared-cpu-4x | 2048MB | 2 machines |
| proxy | shared-cpu-2x | 512MB | 2 machines |
| redis | shared-cpu-2x | 1024MB | 1 machine |
| database | performance-2x | 8192MB | 2 machines |
OpenAI
OpenAI is used on Vernissage for generating photo descriptions and suggesting relevant tags.
- Total tokens used: 368,382
- Total requests: 444
- Total cost: $1.01
The cost remains relatively low, while still helping improve accessibility of shared photos across the platform.
Donations
Thank you very much for all contributions. Your financial support is what makes it possible for the service to operate at all. Below is information about the contributions you made in April.
- Patreon contributions: $141.78
- Stripe contributions: $40.00
In April, the total cost of maintaining the service was $458.44. That is a significant amount. I hope that next month we will be closer to $400 again. It would also be wonderful if contributions could cover around $200 of the total cost. That would reduce the financial pressure on me personally.
My financial report is especially important for new people who are only just joining vernissage.photos. The website does not run for free, because nothing in the world is truly free. When you upload photos to Instagram, you pay with your privacy, your data, or the time you spend looking at ads shown to you. Vernissage has no ads and no algorithms designed to artificially keep you on the platform. There are only photos created by other artists. So, if you are a user, upload photos, but are not yet among the Patrons, I warmly encourage you to consider joining them. Even the smallest amount helps the platform continue to exist.
At the moment, vernissage.photos has 563 registered accounts, and 138 users were active during the last month. The number of users grew significantly in April, which makes me extremely happy.
Thank you again to everyone who supports the project. Thanks to your contributions, the service can continue to operate exactly as it does today.
— Marcin Czachurski