Yes its another somewhat-irregular call for donations to keep Growing Fruit running. The last time we asked for money was Feb 2016.
Report on expenses
Since 2016 we have upgraded the server to the $50/month plan which gives us very good throughput, and the images were offloaded to AWS since they can hold as many images as we can muster. Here is a summary of the costs since the last round of donations.
| Costs since 2-16 | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| dates | # months | Linode | AWS | Mailgun | total per month | cost for period | |
| 2/16 to 1/17 | 11 | $35 | $0 | $0 | $35 | $385 | |
| 2/17 to 8/18 | 19 | $35 | $15 | $0 | $50 | $950 | |
| 9/18 - 5/19 | 9 | $50 | $35 | $0 | $85 | $765 | |
| total 2/16-5/19 | $2,100 |
Linode is the underlying server, AWS is the Amazon image storing service, and Mailgun sends all those email notices for us. The key increase is AWS, and not so much for storage but for displaying the images. The above number is the average, but recently AWS has been increasing and its now more like $60/month just to display all the images (only $5/month to store them). We may need to look for another image hosting method if AWS cost keeps increasing.
Call for donations
This website has no ads to pay for it, we pay for it by collectively kicking in a few bucks every now and then. There is no recommended donation or levels, it is solely up to you. If you don’t want to contribute thats A-OK! If you want to contribute a bunch, that’s also A-OK!
Please send your donations to my Paypal account: sfs@scottfrasersmith.com. If you use the “friends and family” option there is no surcharge so please use that. The next call for donations will be when the money from this call runs out.
Here is what we got in Feb 2016 for the record: $1,221. The median donation last time was $20 if you are curious. We are around $900 in the hole now as the AWS costs increased faster than I had thought they would.
While Paypal is easier, If you would prefer to send a check or cash that will also work. Here is my address.
Thanks for your support!
keep up the good work Scotty!