2024 Budget

The OWG has sent it’s budget request for 2024 in to the board and is requesting an operational budget of €130,767.56 and a capital budget of €12,650.00. For reference, this is £114,607.85 and £11,086.77. This includes operational contingencies of €6,250.00 and capital contingencies of €11,150.00, which we will only be spending if necessary.

We are opting to extend the life of some hardware rather than purchase new, which saves significantly on the capital costs. Capital costs will be higher in the following years based on the lifecycle of our current hardware and the possibility of new requirements. Several operational items are budgeted at the high end of the possible cost such as travel to data centers and we will, like always, try to minimize these costs.

The budget does not include the cost of insurance or SRE and staff costs. We will request additional budget for the former when we have a quote, and the board can add the latter in.

Opex and capex are split this year, as discussed and requested in November, and this allows future expenses to be more accurately predicted. It also allows us to look at what different services cost on an ongoing basis, something that was previously impossible and caused significant confusion last year.

Breaking down the operational costs by service, we plan to spend €20,407.64 on costs not attributable to any one service; €10,288.59 on costs attributable to the standard tile layer; €46,656.80 on costs attributable to the website, API, and planet; and €47,164.48 on costs attributable to other services.

Broken down by type of expense, about €61k is associated with power, network, and other costs of running two sites, about €2k on subscriptions, and €42k on the ongoing depreciation of hardware.

This budget is approximately 50% lower in cash flow than the 2022 and 2023 budgets. We believe the operational expenses are lower, but cannot be positive as this budget is prepared with operational and capital expenses instead of previous budgets which were purely cash flow.

The spreadsheet used to derive these budget numbers is available on the website and contains our known budget risks.