TL;DR: This month, the total operating cost of the https://vernissage.photos platform was $448.20, of which $326.60 was contributed by patrons. Thank you very much for every contribution!
Below is a detailed financial report for operating https://vernissage.photos during May 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: 905 GB
- Total number of files: 3,225,118
- Total cost: $48.01
In May, the amount of stored data increased much more than it did in April. In April, storage grew by 60 GB of photos. In May, it grew by as much as 120 GB. This is a significant difference, most likely caused by several new accounts that follow a large number of other users, which means we need to fetch photos from a larger number of servers. At least this month I was not surprised by an additional CloudFront charge, as I now pay $15 for that service.
Fly.io
In May, the cost of services hosted on Fly.io increased by around $20 compared with April. The resource sizes did not change. The increase was mainly caused by significantly higher inbound and outbound traffic, which we are also charged for.
- Total cost: $398.80
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 to generate photo descriptions and suggest relevant tags.
- Total tokens used: 541,157
- Total requests: 575
- Total cost: $1.39
The cost remains relatively low, while still helping improve the accessibility of photos shared across the platform.
Donations
Thank you very much to everyone who contributes to supporting the platform. This help is something I simply could not manage without. I am especially grateful to the person who sent a $160 “Gift” contribution - for the second time already. Thank you very, very much. 💚
- Patreon contributions: $326.60
- Stripe contributions: $0.00
In May, the total cost of maintaining the service was $448.20. That is a significant amount, and it looks like this may become the new monthly baseline. It is unfortunate that every server needs to download all resources locally. Overall, this is very inefficient - not only in terms of cost, but also in terms of the resources we consume as the Fediverse. It is hard to call this particularly environmentally friendly.
At the moment, vernissage.photos has 612 registered accounts, and 135 users were active during the last month. The number of registered users increased in May, while the number of active accounts remained at a similar level. To everyone who has recently joined the Vernissage community: please remember that this place can continue to exist only thanks to your support.
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