now go forth and donate to the infrastructure, because renting hardware is not free.

but only if you are able to do so.

how much does it cost to host a lemmy instance

Not nearly as much as it "costs" to admin and moderate one.

Relative to other Fediverse software it is expensive due to how much community federation and vote traffic drives up compute and storage needs.

The exact costs really depend on your location and if you are renting a server or run it on your own hardware. But I doubt you can run a well federated Lemmy instance for much less than 30€/month. Of course it initially runs on a much cheaper VPS, but once you start subscribing to remote communities it quickly needs more power and storage.

You can get a decent VPS (Hetzner is well-liked) for ~$8 USD. Using an S3 bucket for media storage starts at a few cents per month and will grow from there based on how you set up media retention, but it'll take a while for that to be a real cost. Plus whatever your domain costs (~$1-2/mo is pretty standard).

So all in probably about $10/mo.

That's more than enough for a small instance, probably enough for a medium-sized instance too. Admins of the big instances probably have more info about what happens when you get huge.

Of course you could run it all on your own equipment at home for "free" too.

I did for a while on a pi 4 for fun. It worked. Now im hosting a piefed instance for fun.

On AWS EC2 its probably 5$ a month-ish for a single user instance. For anything else, not sure.

Thank you for all your efforts in what appears to be an often thankless job.
Let's pass the hat around and raise some funds!

I wish you a seagulless 2026

Please someone do it I’m tired of my feed not loading. Isn’t there some way to contribute to the servers hosting power like a true decentralized service? Like how the EVM works?

But the seagulls - poke at my head; not fun!

I said "seagulls, stop it now!"

Hm ha, hm-hm-hm ha-hm hm ha, hm-hm-hm hm-ha hm ha, hm-hm-hm hm hm-hm ha!