Financials
This web page details the expenses of AssistantApps . This information is made available in the spirit of open source transparency.If you want more information, Join the Patron 😉
The main categories of expenses are from hosting costs. While we try to keep costs low by using free services and/or building whatever we need ourselves, there are unavoidable benefits from using the cloud (someone else's machine)
Virtual servers
With these machines we are able to host back-end code, web apps, websites and more
Software & Licences
There are some things that are cheaper to pay for than invest the time to build ourselves
Miscellaneous
The many small expenses we have start adding up very quickly 😅
Cost breakdown
| Cost / year | Name | Description | Billed monthly |
|---|---|---|---|
| $ 336.00 | Dedicated VPS - Digital Ocean Droplet | Back-end APIs & scheduled tasks & services | $ 28 |
| $ 288.00 | Mastodon - Digital Ocean Droplet | NoMansSky.social Mastodon instance | $ 24 |
| $ 124.80 | Automated Digital Ocean Droplet backups | Full snapshots of the virtual machines, happens once a week | $ 10.40 |
| $ 99.00 | Apple Developer Licence | This cost is one of the most frustrating, we pay Apple for the privilege of them rejecting our iOS app updates | - |
| $ 35.00 | MEE6 bot | A fun Discord bot with a lot of features, hopefully one day I will get the time to write these functions myself | - |
| $ 16.80 | Discord bot hosting | This is a Discord bot hosting service for our custom No Man's Sky Discord bot | $ 1.40 |
| $ ±12.00 | AWS S3 bucket | We use this for all the uploaded user images, mostly from the NoMansSky.Social Mastodon Instance | $ ±1.00 |
| $ 8.00 | assistantapps.com | - | |
| $ 8.00 | nmsassistant.com | - | |
| $ 8.00 | nomanssky.social | - | |
| $ 8.00 | nmscd.com | - | |
| $ 943.60 | Total | - |
Cost Saving strategies
Making use of Github Pages when possible
We try to host website & web apps on Github Pages when possible. In some
cases it is only possible to host websites on our servers.
Making use of Github Actions when possible
We make use of the free build minutes that Github Actions provides (2000 per
month). With
these build minutes we can automate the compiling and deploying of our
websites. The automation saves us time and ensures that we do not introduce
problems during the compilation or deployment.
Making use of Azure DevOps & Azure Portal free tiers
We make use of the free build minutes that Azure DevOps provides (1800 per
month). These build minutes are typically used for the back-end applications
as it is a more private build and deployment environment. We also make use
of Azure App Insights for back-end logs & analytics. The Azure App Insights
are not completely free because of the amount of traffic that our back-end
receives, but we do have cost limits set to 0, so it is mostly free.
Cache all the static assets
We make use of Cloudflare to cache all of our static assets. In the
situations where we pay based on traffic, this really saves us money. For
our Mastodon instance we are using AWS S3 buckets for user uploads, we are
charged for the traffic of these assets.
Use free tier support platforms
To manage issues reported by users and to make supporting them an easier
process. We use the free tools offered by Freshworks (mostly Freshdesk).