It is, thankfully, surprisingly cheap! In part, that's because it is a relatively simple tech stack - PHP, MySQL, a couple of API calls to external services. It was designed to be as low cost while also being useful. Here's the breakdown:

Hosting - £171 per year

Our biggest expense but, I think, our most reasonable. Krystal charges around £342 for a 2 year contract. That includes unlimited bandwidth and storage, as well as the domain name. We have nearly 400GB of photos and bot scraping means we can use over 900GB of bandwidth per month - so Krystal give us a rather good deal!

Use this affiliate link and code EDENT to get a small discount.

Stadia Maps - US$20 / month

Geocoding is surprisingly hard to do locally. We need to transform latitude and longitude into addresses, and then back again. Stadia Maps cost about the same as our hosting! What's rather annoying is that we only use about half the API calls in our plan. We need to find a cheaper solution.

Mapping - Free!

When we used Stadia for drawing maps, we regularly ran over our quota. So we switched to OpenFreeMap which produces gorgeous interactive maps.

The service has been rock solid and very responsive to bugs on GitHub.

Logo - US$5

I'm not a good designer, so we bought a logo from The Noun Project and then coloured it in. Bargain for a fiver!

Image CDN - Free!

Although we have unlimited bandwidth with Krystal, we're only located in one region - the UK. WeServ. It's also pointless serving full resolution images to small screens.

So WeServ offers free image resizing and global CDNs. Personally, I'm not a fan of CloudFlare (their CDN partner) so I'm looking to change provider.

OCR - Free!

People don't want to type in the inscription of the photo, so we use Google Cloud Vision.

We send less than 1,000 requests per month - so we're inside their free tier. If we get more popular, that'll get more expensive. But I don't know of a local-first OCR which is as good as Google's. Sadly, Tesseract is rubbish for extracting text from photos.

Authentication - Free!

We don't want to store anyone's passwords. The free tier of Auth0 allows us to do social login for up to 25,000 monthly users. Which is more than enough for us.

Sadly, Auth0 don't support the Fediverse, so I had to build my own "Log-in with Mastodon" service.

As much as we'd like to run social login locally, we simply don't want to be responsible for securing users' details & API keys.

Software - Free!

As per the OpenBenches colophon we use a lot of cool FOSS. Small JS libraries, big PHP frameworks, and everything in between.

Income

Thanks to GitHub Sponsors we make a whopping US$3 per month!

Similarly, our OpenCollective Sponsors brings in about £3 per month.

Merchandising! You can buy OpenBenches branded t-shirts, mugs, and hats. That nets us about £20 per year

Call it roughly £80 income. OK, it is better than nothing - but doesn't even cover a quarter of our costs. Sometimes people give us a higher donation privately, which is also very welcome. These people are listed on our README.

Total

On the assumption that our time is worthless (ha!) and that we only rarely go over our providers' API limits, and we get in some revenue, the cost of running OpenBenches is less than £300 per year.

That's not bad for a fun little hobby. People certainly spend more than that on Funkopops, vaping, and mechanical keyboards!

Nevertheless, I'm always slightly worried that we'll go viral and have an unexpectedly high bill from our API providers.

I would love to be able to hire a proper designer to make the site look a bit nicer. I also want to be able to buy a modern iPhone so that I can test it in the latest Safari.

If you have any suggestions for cutting costs, or non-scummy ways to help us raise funds, please drop a comment below.

The problem is - Matrix is shit. Not just on a protocol level, but on an organisational level as well.

I joined Matrix at FOSDEM - the largest gathering of open source nerds in Europe. We were all encouraged to use it - every talk had its own channel, all the official comms came from there, I was even invited to a top-secret private channel for speakers. This was going to be epic! Viva la rèvölūçïón, right? Wrong.

It was dead. Even among the most seasoned geeks on the planet, most people preferred to use other services like Signal, Telegram, and Slack. Why? Because those other tools actually work.

Matrix has two official Android apps - one of which is old and unsupported, the other is new and doesn't work with many of the basic chat features.

I want to be absolutely clear about this - the company behind Matrix have put out an app which doesn't work with their own product! Lest you think I'm exaggerating, here's a typical view of the official FOSDEM speaker room, using the official Matrix app:

It was embarrassing. People would pipe up in channels and say "this doesn't work" only to be told they were using the wrong app and should go back to the one marked unsupported. So they left, never to return. Even in the large talks, where people were encouraged to use the official Matrix chat, most of the conversation happened on other platforms. It was just too hard to use Matrix.

A few thousands geeks, all used to recompiling their own kernels and participating in the Fediverse, and most thought that Matrix was too much of a faff.

After FOSDEM, I kept the Matrix app on my phone. Occasionally receiving a ping from some long-forgotten channel.

And then, one day, I got hit with the most vile spam. A dozen notifications suddenly appeared on my phone with abuse, torture, and transphobic slurs in them.

You can view the screenshot - but, fair warning, it is grim.

This shouldn't be possible. It doesn't take an expensive team of moderators to add some keyword monitoring. It doesn't take a massive AI model to work out that a stranger shouldn't be able to bombard users with multiple notifications. You don't have to sacrifice your dream of a decentralised future - you just need to care about your users.

This stuff is basic.

I moaned about it on Mastdon and was surprised to receive a private reply from the official Matrix account.

Please do not encourage the spammer by giving them a platform and propagating their spam; you may want to consider deleting your post.

This is classic victim blaming. It is my fault for giving the spammer attention. I am the one who needs to take responsibility and delete the evidence. I shouldn't warn people that Matrix is actively dangerous to use.

Bullshit.

Here's what I expected them to say:

"We're sorry you had such a bad experience on Matrix. Rest assured we're working hard to block these spammers - here's a link to show what we're doing. You can protect your account further by doing x, y and z. Once again, sorry and we hope we can win back your trust."

I'm not saying scrappy open source projects have to hire anodyne corporate communications specialists; they just need to have a little empathy.

But, no, just constant whining about how it isn't their fault and how I am the one who needs to change my behaviour.

This is pretty typical behaviour from the team. Find any post complaining about some aspect of Matrix and you'll see their instant woe-is-me replies.

So I deleted the app. I would have liked to have nuked my account but apparently that's not possible.

I'm not the only one who feels like this. Here's an epic post by Marius, which concludes:

Between the slow performance, the increasing amount of spam, the miserable web client, and the unfinished state of Element X, the Matrix.org network is not something I am willing to continue to recommend, especially to non-technical users. Normal people are simply tolerating it to communicate with idealistic nerds like myself who insist(ed) on using it.

Matrix just isn't focussed on users. I'm not talking about user-experience tweaks like which shade of cornflower blue to use - I mean basic user needs like apps that work and a way to combat spam.

There's a long list of ways the protocol contributes to a poor user experience. It almost seems designed without regard for how it will actually be used.

While the protocol may be conceptually interesting and their intentions noble, I'm not prepared to suffer abuse in the name of technical purity.

Open Source and Open Standards nerds like me ought to know by now that the protocol is the least compelling thing about a service. Who cares if your home is built using only Stallman-blessed tools, when the walls are full of rats?