Let's talk economics (Patreon)

Update:

This is the current AWS bill, 5 days into the month. I may have to move AWS to a higher tier or straight up discontinue it at this phase.

I have been contacted by several users about alternative solutions and am looking into it, but I may not have the luxury of even keeping this going while going through the offers...

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Last months AWS bill came in, and it's quite sizable. Let's first say this:

I am not asking for anyone to increase their pledge to offset this, this is just some transparency.

As you see, the net cost for just the patreon downloads last month ended up at almost $3000, adding to that $3500 for server purchase, $1200 in commissionwork and about $400 in other server related costs... I kinda blew past the patreon income last month, and even had to cut really deep into my private funds to make sure all ends are being met.

I expected to go above this month due to the extra one time costs incurred, as well as a certain HS2 release (let's play "spot HS2" in the graph >.<), though the blast up in amazon costs took my kinda by surprise.

This is fine though, I'm not suffering a crushing defeat due to this, as I said, more or less expected, just a bit more severe than I had hoped. I have gotten the patreon pay for this month, and that very much fixed the problems outright.

So, this would be the reason I can't really lower the pledge requirement to access this download option, it's kinda expensive.

In the good news section, I really don't want to increase the pledge requirement, even if it means that I will need to fill in some dollars out of pocket every so often, so as far as I can, I will avoid that. $10 is accessible, if I increase it to like $20, I may see some more money come in, but at the cost of making a lot of you lose access and make the world a bit thougher for those of you that really can't use BitTorrent for whatever reason.

For those of you that can use BitTorrent no problem though, I'll ask that you use BitTorrent wherever you can, as it helps out quite a lot <3 

For those of you wondering why I'm charging $10 for download options that aren't google drive... hope this answers the question for you.

Also, for everyone, thank you a lot for your support, thanks to you all I am able to help getting these games to shine and make for the best entry point to the game I can, it means the world to be able to (^_^)