Cashflow Positive

August was the first month in over three years I didn’t get a massive Digital Ocean invoice for the hosting of vmst.io.

This entire month has been interesting as there are days that I don’t even think about Mastodon at all, despite being so heads down in it for so long. No longer waking up every day to see what work had landed from the European development team in my early morning. No longer pushing the latest code to production and triaging user feedback. I don’t miss it anywhere near as much as I thought I would.

I didn’t start an instance to make money, far from it, and for a long time I felt like the difference between what was coming in as subscriber contributions and what I was worth the difference in terms of what I was adding to the ecosystem. To be clear, the financial situation was not the main reason why I closed the instance, but it definitely played a big part.

I don’t miss that hit at all.