TL;DR: In July, the total operating cost of the https://vernissage.photos platform was $451.17, of which $187.19 was covered by contributions from supporters. Thank you very much for every contribution!
Below is a detailed financial report covering the operation of https://vernissage.photos in July 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 user-uploaded files and relies on Amazon CloudFront—a content delivery network (CDN)—to distribute them quickly and reliably across the internet.
- Total storage used: 994 GB
- Total number of files: 4,205,759
- Total cost: $49.71
As you can see, storage usage increased by another 40 GB in July. Despite this growth, the total cost remained almost unchanged compared with June, which is very encouraging.
Fly.io
In July, the cost of services hosted on Fly.io was similar to the cost recorded in June. The additional expense of approximately $10 resulted from launching a new service that enables push notifications on mobile devices, including the Vernissage application for iOS.
- Total cost: $399.98
Here is a breakdown of the services currently in use:
| Name | Type | RAM | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| push Web Push notifications | shared-cpu-1x | 512MB | 2 machines |
| relay iOS Push notifications | shared-cpu-1x | 512MB | 2 machines |
| web Angular (SSR) application | shared-cpu-2x | 1024MB | 2 machines |
| api Core API | shared-cpu-4x | 2048MB | 2 machines |
| jobs Background/async jobs | shared-cpu-4x | 2048MB | 2 machines |
| proxy Proxy (nginx) service | shared-cpu-2x | 512MB | 2 machines |
| redis Queue service | shared-cpu-2x | 1024MB | 1 machine |
| database PostgreSQL database | performance-2x | 8192MB | 2 machines |
OpenAI
OpenAI services are used by Vernissage to generate photo descriptions and suggest relevant tags.
- Total tokens used: 546,395
- Total requests: 681
- Total cost: $1.48
The cost remains relatively low while helping to improve the accessibility and discoverability of photos shared across the platform.
Donations
Thank you very much for all your contributions. This support is essential to keeping the platform operating in its current form and gives me greater peace of mind when planning its maintenance and future development.
- Patreon contributions: $187.19
- Stripe contributions: $0.00
In July, the total operating cost of the service was $451.17. Unfortunately, I had to cover most of this amount from my personal funds, which represents a significant financial burden.
I hope that more people will consider financially supporting the project. Broader community support would allow me to approach the platform’s future with much greater confidence.
Many people have become accustomed to online platforms being available free of charge without necessarily considering the real cost of operating them. Commercial platforms often recover these costs through advertising, the collection and monetisation of personal data, or algorithmically managed timelines designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible.
Vernissage follows a different approach. It does not display advertisements, sell user data, or use engagement-driven algorithms to manipulate the timeline. For this reason, I would like to ask every user who enjoys the platform and would like to see it continue to consider becoming a supporter. Even a small monthly contribution makes a meaningful difference.
At the moment, Vernissage has 747 registered users (an increase of almost 100 accounts) and 213 of them were active during the last month. The project currently has 33 supporters on Patreon. I sincerely hope that this number will grow in the coming months.
Receiving funding from NLNet would also provide significant support for the project, although I remain cautiously optimistic about the outcome of the grant application.
Thank you again to everyone who supports Vernissage. Your contributions make it possible for the service to continue operating in its current form.
— Marcin Czachurski