Today, we’re providing an update on the project’s finances, offering greater transparency on the current budget and past expenses, as well as our plans to address the ongoing deficit. Last month, we fell short of our target by a significant margin, highlighting that the cost of running the server currently exceeds sustainable levels.
Here’s the TL;DR:
As you can see, costs have fluctuated over time. Much of the expense isn’t from the primary server but from adding new services to support the community, experiments, or from variable costs that change based on the number of active players we have at a given time. Some examples include:
Our current donations platform has also not met our exact needs and we have been evaluating alternatives for several months. We plan to make this transition by the end of the year, and will benefit from several new features, including a more accurate reflection of the account balance and the ability to keep and track receipts. Until that point, our target donation goal will remain $2,500 to give us some buffer, but it will be clearer going forward what our actual costs are starting now. The overall project has been over budget and underfunded for a while, and while we have had a mysterious benefactor to help cover the difference, that person is transitioning away and that will no longer be the case (Aconite, it's Aconite).
While we haven’t done a lot of advertising for it, we are actually a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit public charity, and as such, donations are actually tax deductible. If you have an extraordinarily cool employer that matches donations to nonprofits, we would welcome their support, too. We’re working on providing an updated page on our website that will provide more details about how you can support the project through donations soon. In addition, our new donation platform would allow us to cosmetically recognize our benefactors through things like special Discord roles.
There's some really exciting stuff coming this year and we are working hard to bring a lot of new eyes to the server. Some of these things you can already check out on Test Center now! There is also much more that we can do if we exceed the budget to provide a better experience, so we will always welcome more money! Of course, our first responsibility as a team is to make sure that your money is well spent and that we are not being wasteful with this opportunity we have been afforded to restore our favorite game. For all who support the project, we deeply appreciate it and are honored to help you all experience the greatest saga ever told… yours.
Here’s the TL;DR:
- The budget spreadsheet has been updated to reflect current expenses from October 2024: https://swgr.org/go/budget.
- We have uploaded the last sixteen months of invoices from our hosting provider AWS, which now has all invoices from December 2021.
- AWS costs have inflated over time and not enough time was dedicated to optimizing our expenses, but we have taken, and will continue to take steps to reduce our spend.
- Starting next year, we'll be on a new donation platform to provide a more accurate depiction of current finances and better support our non-profit giving status (e.g., to provide you with receipts for your donations that you can use for tax deduction purposes).
As you can see, costs have fluctuated over time. Much of the expense isn’t from the primary server but from adding new services to support the community, experiments, or from variable costs that change based on the number of active players we have at a given time. Some examples include:
- Additional testing servers, such as temporary servers used for alpha testing of Publishes.
- A dedicated log storage and retrieval system to assist in customer support and analytics
- A web server hosting internal support tools to assist our CSRs
- A global accelerator network to reduce ping and latency
- Increased backup storage
Our current donations platform has also not met our exact needs and we have been evaluating alternatives for several months. We plan to make this transition by the end of the year, and will benefit from several new features, including a more accurate reflection of the account balance and the ability to keep and track receipts. Until that point, our target donation goal will remain $2,500 to give us some buffer, but it will be clearer going forward what our actual costs are starting now. The overall project has been over budget and underfunded for a while, and while we have had a mysterious benefactor to help cover the difference, that person is transitioning away and that will no longer be the case (Aconite, it's Aconite).
While we haven’t done a lot of advertising for it, we are actually a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit public charity, and as such, donations are actually tax deductible. If you have an extraordinarily cool employer that matches donations to nonprofits, we would welcome their support, too. We’re working on providing an updated page on our website that will provide more details about how you can support the project through donations soon. In addition, our new donation platform would allow us to cosmetically recognize our benefactors through things like special Discord roles.
There's some really exciting stuff coming this year and we are working hard to bring a lot of new eyes to the server. Some of these things you can already check out on Test Center now! There is also much more that we can do if we exceed the budget to provide a better experience, so we will always welcome more money! Of course, our first responsibility as a team is to make sure that your money is well spent and that we are not being wasteful with this opportunity we have been afforded to restore our favorite game. For all who support the project, we deeply appreciate it and are honored to help you all experience the greatest saga ever told… yours.