Supporting the Kiwi Farms - Options are cryptocurrency and check in the mail. Read this for how to do it.

[Jimmy Dean Bowl]

Obviously. I'm trying to justify a $12k monthly spend and the internet isn't helpful. It seems like a lot, even operating in an elevated threat landscape and under economic sanctions. It would be genuinely interesting to see a detailed breakdown showing what portion of the operating budget goes toward things like colocation, bandwidth, legal and financial services, hardware attrition, Null paying himself a median household income (I see nothing wrong with this), building savings or a "war chest," etc.

At this point I've seen enough calling people "retards" and "faggots," while complaining about being the "nigger of the world" because some idiot rudely said he dislikes a minor user interface change, that I'm morbidly fascinated by this strange vision of a professional peer whose cumulative life choices basically led him to a position of running a Russian small business whose value proposition is "коуп и снид." It is very interesting and not out of line to ask, since I'm being asked to donate money and have not forgotten the "furnish my apartment" fundraising campaign.

I do notice and appreciate various improvements like Ajax requests rarely timing out, the new top and bottom navigation buttons, the improved search engine, the new forum icons and thread badges, the new media player powered by a cluster of RTX 4000 SFF GPUs (good choice because the donation was earmarked for that), and whatever else I'm forgetting since I last used the forum. So I'm not coming at this from a position of, "you're asking for $12k per month and I hate this extremely minor feature like a CSS border around someone's avatar."

You choose whether or not to donate based on how you value the site.
I choose to because the site is important to me and I think Jersh deserves a decent living for everything he has sacrificed.
He doesn't owe us his accounts. You either donate because you think the site deserves to stay up, or you don't.

 

[Null]

Obviously. I'm trying to justify a $12k monthly spend and the internet isn't helpful. It seems like a lot, even operating in an elevated threat landscape and under economic sanctions. It would be genuinely interesting to see a detailed breakdown showing what portion of the operating budget goes toward things like colocation, bandwidth, legal and financial services, hardware attrition, Null paying himself a median household income (I see nothing wrong with this), building savings or a "war chest," etc.

At this point I've seen enough calling people "retards" and "faggots," while complaining about being the "nigger of the world" because some idiot rudely said he dislikes a minor user interface change, that I'm morbidly fascinated by this strange vision of a professional peer whose cumulative life choices basically led him to a position of running a Russian small business whose value proposition is "коуп и снид." It is very interesting and not out of line to ask, since I'm being asked to donate money and have not forgotten the "furnish my apartment" fundraising campaign.

I do notice and appreciate various improvements like Ajax requests rarely timing out, the new top and bottom navigation buttons, the improved search engine, the new forum icons and thread badges, the new media player powered by a cluster of RTX 4000 SFF GPUs (good choice because the donation was earmarked for that), and whatever else I'm forgetting since I last used the forum. So I'm not coming at this from a position of, "you're asking for $12k per month and I hate this extremely minor feature like a CSS border around someone's avatar."

How much money a month do you think I personally deserve for running this website?



Do you believe I deserve less money than Raul Pajeet working for FAGMAN? Because what you're telling me right now seems to imply that you think my labor and unique skillset, along with total assumption of liability for everything on this site, with no bottom to how much shit I can potentially eat one day if something goes really wrong, is worth less than what some H-1B nigger working for Microsoft makes.

If I doubled the goal and was getting $24,000 a month I'd only be making what my salary would be at FAGMAN doing half the work, with 8 hour work days, with medical insurance, with retirement contributions, without thousands in business expenses, without being on call, without having the sword of damacles hanging over me, without the possibility it just evaporates because I said something wrong and started a user riot, and without having to worry about my perpetual reputation.

If I lose even a single lawsuit, I'm fucked. If I mishandle user data, I'm fucked. If I upset the community, I'm fucked. If a new administration comes in and they go after me, I'm fucked. These are not problems anyone else has to deal with. Raul Pajeet in FAGMAN wakes up, drinks coffee, puts in his 8, jerks off to onlyfans, drives his tesla around san fran. He has no worries. He has no problems. Just put in the 8.

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

A seasoned rust programmer could readily get 100k annually in the private sector, I suspect. On top of that comes the substantial added cost of risk, liability, hardware and bandwidth expenses etc. 144k annually does not seem like a high number.

And KF is a great site. There is nothing else like it on the internet.

 

[Jotch]

I think kiwi farms is worth at least $20 a month

 

[Otis Mallebrok]

Time donations now possible.

https://kiwifarms.pa/account/billpay-support

Can you donate kiwi gold to others using crypto?

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

Can you donate kiwi gold to others using crypto?

Yes, because you don't donate it to them directly. You buy yourself additional time, then you can spend that additional time in one month blocks by donating it to other users.

You may need to buy multiple months/years via crypto and it's possible it won't let you buy another year until yours is up, but I doubt it.

 

[ᚠᚢᚦᚩᚱᚳ]

How much money a month do you think I personally deserve for running this website?

I'm not coming at it from that angle at all. If you just said you were gonna use half the donations on living expenses and retirement savings, that's completely understandable. It's very close to my net income, in fact. What's not understandable, is going nuts about how you deserve a FAGMAN salary as a senior engineer (which you'd know is highly exceptional if you had a normal job), when your position is a direct consequence of your own life choices.

I'm seriously interested in an answer to the question, "what does it actually cost to maintain a web property that exists in a state of constant cyber war?" That is not even an exaggeration of the situation. Like how much rack space and bandwidth does it physically use, and at what premium? What portion of the budget is spent defending against lolsuits? I'd consider that info a precondition for a recurring donation of any amount, even if it's only available to the donators themselves, because that info is precisely the value of your unique skill set. It just seems high to me, and I'm responding to the first time I saw an actual dollar amount required to make the site financially sustainable, obviously from a degree of ignorance despite KF being by far one of the most financially transparent sites online. I can just visit the forum and see that someone donated $6k to improve media embeds, and you bought three of the top GPUs and implemented a media upload queue for little or no labor cost. That's respectable.

It's pretty much a catch-22 because there is no amount of respect and praise that can sweeten even the most mild criticism such as suggesting a monthly financial pie chart, from someone whose existence is maximally adversarial to the internet at large due to circumstantial and personality factors, so instead of a reasoned answer I get a screed about how an NSA-funded mega-corporation isn't paying you a quarter mill to vibe code. I'm not going to apologize for working a normal salary job, and I'm not going to feed your delusion that my career wouldn't also be over if I mishandled PII in any way.

I'm saying that I'd find legitimate value in receiving detailed information about running resilient companies where one day, you're not connectable to some ISP, and the next day your domain registration gets pulled, then someone spams DCMA complaints, then the DDoS attacks start back up (though they never fully went away), then this and that. It is not a personal attack or a question of the value of your labor, it's a desire for relevant info. Please understand this point.

 

[reptile baht spaniard rid]

It is not a personal attack or a question of the value of your labor, it's a desire for relevant info. Please understand this point.

Mr Fong Jones, pleasure to meat you.

If you want detailed financials, you should be investing in the forum, in the amounts of many multiples of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

If you're demanding financials for $20 a mo, you can and should likely just fuck right off.

 

[sallowhal]

null if you want my $20 you better tell me how much you spend on cheese every month i swear to god

 

[Me•cha•ni•cal]

It is not a personal attack or a question of the value of your labor, it's a desire for relevant info

I get where you’re coming from, you want to know what running the site costs excluding his salary. Valid thing to be curious about.

If he were to divulge that information he would also need to reveal exactly how much he pays himself. If he does that you will bitch about how he’s making more than he should (which you’ve already done by questioning his estimation of the forums expenses to begin with, and then again by arguing that he should earn less than others in similar professions).

I don’t see how this can be anything other than a personal attack and really bad form, bro.

 

[Phillip Green]

I'd consider that info a precondition for a recurring donation of any amount...

I don't understand why a voluntary $20/month donation to support Null and the site is contingent on your expert analysis of the site's operational costs. You say you're not commenting on the value of his labor, but you've got some "fair" profit criteria in mind based on your own ~$6k/month salary.

Even if the site's operational costs were zero (which they most certainly are not), $12k/month without benefits is very low pay for an independent contractor performing combined ops, dev, and infrastructure management roles, each of which are individually $125-150K (with benefits) jobs in American corporate IT. Perhaps this seems excessive wherever you are, but in the USA, where this site is operating from, Josh is still working for peanuts.

Ultimately, if you have the means and value the site enough to donate the $20, do so. If you don't, don't. No need to apply some weird labor value theory analysis here.

 

[Null]

what does it actually cost to maintain a web property that exists in a state of constant cyber war?

top of my head

monthly
legal fees: $1000/mo minimum
datacenter (power, uplink, space): $1000/mo
Tartarus frontends: $750 ~ $1000/mo depending*
s3 storage: $500/mo
AI: $400/mo**

annually
internet numbers: $1050/yr
domains: $1000/yr***
licenses: $250/yr
incorporation fees: several hundred, probably $500+ minimum for all the LLCs I manage.

tax
us federal corporate income: 21%
wv state corporate income: 6.5%****

I'm missing stuff but those are the big ones. the smaller ones do add up.

this does not factor in any once-off costs like hardware. if the switch breaks, i buy it. if we need to run a fiber drop, i pay for it. if the harddrives fail, i put it on credit cards. in 2025 we bought both NVMes and HDDs to move our DB onto NVMe SSD and to fix failing HDDs in our RAID (which is now over 24TB). this may seem nominal, but they're thousands of dollars, and because we're talking "what does it ACTUALLY COST", you might not factor in that not making any profit means you can't save which means that when anything breaks it's fucking panic time. this isn't in the cloud where things magically never have issues and you float as a little kawaii vps in the sky: when something breaks, I pay to fix it.

this also does not factor in utilities I pay for for myself (because you evidently don't care about anything behind the keyboard), but if you were to factor that in, I pay for a bunch of business stuff to protect myself and my whereabouts that almost nobody else to pay for. that also adds up.


* Our frontend clusters have to each be Kiwi Farms complaint volume tolerant, Kiwi Farms content tolerant, in-house DDoS protected, with at least 1Gbps clean. This is a very, very expensive category of provider.

** I run AI so much that I hit limits on two different providers at their maximum plan. I refuse to play for overage so I alternate. Yes, I'm serious. No, I'd not get rid of it. I honestly feel like they're undercharging and could scalp people if they really wanted. The productivity multiplier is priceless.

*** This is a rough estimate but it's not cheap, I park a ton of TLDs because we can and have lost them sequentially.

**** "Why WV?" If you weren't around, we were literally abandoned by our Wyoming registered agent because of complaints. West Virginia is the only state in the country that lets you incorporate into a PO box with no named registered agent (the WV SOS acts as our attorney-in-fact for service). Thus, W.V. gets a 6.5% freedom tax I happily pay.

 

[skunt]

cheese: 6k/mo

 

[teriyakiburns]

cheese: 6k/mo

That's on the low end.

 

[ᚠᚢᚦᚩᚱᚳ]

top of my head

Thanks. This is exactly the kind of info that for me, put into a monthly newsletter, would justify a recurring donation more than a gold avatar or the ability to upvote posts. A breakdown of "this bill came due, this measure is necessary to counter this threat, this is relatively more expensive, this became a priority."

I'm always trying to fortify my personal financial position. Hearing the decision-making process of a sanctioned entity is highly relevant right now. I think it's extremely valuable to develop a mindset where some arbitrary account can be taken away at any time, and dealing with it sucks but is not the end of the world.

 

[Null]

Thanks. This is exactly the kind of info that for me, put into a monthly newsletter, would justify a recurring donation more than a gold avatar or the ability to upvote posts. A breakdown of "this bill came due, this measure is necessary to counter this threat, this is relatively more expensive, this became a priority."

I'm always trying to fortify my personal financial position. Hearing the decision-making process of a sanctioned entity is highly relevant right now. I think it's extremely valuable to develop a mindset where some arbitrary account can be taken away at any time, and dealing with it sucks but is not the end of the world.

i actually don't like talking about specifics because it enables lfj and vordrak to know what to target.

 

[gagabobo1997]

** I run AI so much that I hit limits on two different providers at their maximum plan. I refuse to play for overage so I alternate. Yes, I'm serious. No, I'd not get rid of it. I honestly feel like they're undercharging and could scalp people if they really wanted. The productivity multiplier is priceless.

I seriously dont understand how claude max is only $200/mo. I've checked my usage after a long week of using it and have seen the equivalent API cost being over $1000 and still having plenty of my limit left. I imagine they'll get much more expensive in the future if the companies need to pivot towards profitability through actual use of their models rather than investor funding.

 

[Preacher ✝]

i actually don't like talking about specifics because it enables lfj and vordrak to know what to target.

While I personally don't care about these specifics, if there's enough demand for the information would some sort of subscribers only post be reasonable? Is there a middle ground where you could provide numbers without enough specific data to be dangerous if leaked?

 

[Autistic Joe]

this isn't in the cloud where things magically never have issues and you float as a little kawaii vps in the sky

Can confirm, this is actually how cloud works. The devops team at work told me so.

 

[ᚠᚢᚦᚩᚱᚳ]

i actually don't like talking about specifics because it enables lfj and vordrak to know what to target.

I implicitly trust you to decide what's safe to share. I honestly think you have the ability by now to write a book in the vein of How to Be Invisible or Extreme Privacy. I was gonna attach the books but didn't want to get subpoena'd.