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If possible, maybe you could start a Ko-fi account as a tip jar and accept one-off donations that way? I know that myself and others use Ko-fi for this purpose, and I (along with many others) would gladly help you out in a small way to help SkyFeed keep going!

I'm currently writing a comprehensive guide on how to use SkyFeed for a general non-coding audience, and the first thing I looked for on your profile was a way to support your development financially. I think having a Ko-fi link on your main profile would be a highly visible way to do that!

I currently have credits to you and the @skyfeed.app account for making SkyFeed possible, and I would happily also include any methods for interested parties to help out with server costs, including your GitHub. (Especially since I feel like I gave a lot of visibility to SkyFeed from the guide-

Let's get straight to the point: Renting servers for hosting all 75k+ SkyFeed feeds for millions of users daily costs me ~1094 EUR/month SkyFeed is 100% free, so the only income is my GitHub Sponsors (github.com/redsolver) with ~191 EUR/month The math does not quite work out here.

What's the general breakdown of the hosting costs? Bandwidth, Compute, or Storage?

The most expensive part is compute, I have a lot of dedicated Hetzner servers for running the queries. Storage is also pretty expensive, but that's part of the dedicated servers (nvmes), so not really an extra cost. Bandwidth is 2 TB per month max, I'm only serving compressed JSON (a lot of it)

Donations mostly covered costs at the end of 2024, but expenses skyrocketed as I scaled everything to keep up with Bluesky growing quickly. While fighting the fires popping up in the infrastructure, I couldn't really focus on releasing new features, fix bugs or implement long-promised improvements

It felt wrong to ask for money before delivering the level of service I expect. But being a solo developer and SkyFeed not my main job made that near-impossible. I also realized that the current architecture struggled to keep up, let alone enable new resource-intensive features I promised long ago.

I do DevOps, are there any optimizations we can make to lower the server costs?

The most effective optimization is really the new architecture, because the old one was built in the early days of Bluesky and never designed for massive scale. So while tuning individual feeds and optimizing some knobs did help and reduce resource usage, they were mostly band-aids.

When will it be fixed? This is day 2 for me.

what exactly are you referring to?