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Operational Costs
1. Variable Infrastructure Costs
Component
Description
Estimated Cost Range (per region)
Notes
Self-hosted Supabase
Includes Postgres DB, Auth, Realtime, Storage, Edge Functions
$24.49 – $48.49 /mo
Depends on instance size (CCX23–CCX33) and MAU scaling
Streaming Server
Manages VM/game session lifecycle, WebSocket rooms, monitoring
$24 – $192 /mo
Based on Hetzner CCX tiers (e.g. CCX23 → CCX53). Handles ~16k concurrent lobby conns / 1k active game sessions
RustFS Storage Server
Dedicated storage node for archives, builds, assets
$30 /mo
Single instance; scales horizontally as content expands
CDN (Bunny.net)
Static delivery of builds, images, client assets
$5 – $10 /mo
Low-cost; scales by GB egress ($0.01–$0.03/GB typical)
Monitoring + Logging
Lightweight setup (Vector)
$0 /mo
DNS / Domain + SSL
Cloudflare or Namecheap with full SSL routing
$2 – $5 /mo
Negligible per region
Backup + Redundancy
DB + file backups on object storage (Backblaze B2.)
$5 – $15 /mo
Depends on data volume
Dashboard & Console + Website
User Dashboard, Account, Billing, Developer Console
$10 – $40 /mo
Can be deployed shared host
Email / Notification Service
Transactional & verification emails
$5 – $10 /mo
Using Resend, Postmark, or SES
CI/CD & DevOps automation
GitHub, ghcr.io
$21/mo
For build + deploy pipelines
There are no rows in this table
Scaling by Monthly Active Users (MAU)
Starter / MVP Tier (1k–5k Active Users)
Single-region setup with one Supabase instance, one streaming server, and the full web layer (Dashboard, Landing Page, Console App).
Load is light — minimal DB activity, light WebSocket traffic, and basic monitoring.
Expected cost: $250–$380/mo
Growth Tier (5k–25k Active Users)
This setup expands to around three regions.
Each region gets its own Streaming Server, and Supabase is upgraded to CCX33.
Basic CDN caching starts being useful here.
Estimated Monthly Cost: $670 – $920
Scale Tier (25,000 – 100,000+ Active Users)
At this point, we’re running across 5+ regions, with multiple Streaming Servers and Supabase clusters.
Load balancers, autoscaling, Redis caching, and global CDN become necessary.
Monitoring and redundancy also scale up.
Estimated Monthly Cost: $1,100 – $1,680
2. Fixed Operational Costs (Team & Roles)
DevOps
Description
Typical Cost Range
Support / Ops Manager
Handles support tickets, billing, Discord moderation
$500 – $1,500/mo
Administrator of Services
Manages monitoring systems, adds/removes/updates game sessions, VMs, and backend nodes. Most tasks are automated, but some cases require manual intervention (e.g., service recovery, configuration updates, or scaling adjustments).
$500 – $1,200/mo
Designer / Creative (part-time)
Visuals, UI assets, marketing graphics
$300 – $1,000/mo
Community & Marketing Manager
Socials, campaigns, outreach
$700 – $2,500/mo
Frontend / UI Developer
Works on Dashboard, Client App, and web UX improvements
$500 – $2,000/mo
DevOps / Infra Engineer
Deployment automation, scaling, and backend reliability
$1,000 – $3,000/mo
There are no rows in this table
For MVP, most of these roles overlap and can be handled by 1–2 people.
3. Server Infrastructure (Game Session Hosts)
These are GPU-powered machines that run actual game sessions — the biggest variable cost in the stack.
Category
Description
Target Rate
Notes
Decentralized GPU Nodes
On-demand GPUs from decentralized networks (e.g., Render, Akash)
$0.05 – $0.12 / GPU-hour (ideal)
Sustainable pricing for subscription model
Upper Bound Rate (Max)
Maximum acceptable GPU cost per hour
$0.12 – $0.18 / GPU-hour
Beyond this, margins become tight for flat subscription
Pricing Objective
Subscription users (unlimited sessions within fair-use)
-
Profitability relies on cost ceiling under $0.12/hr average GPU utilization
There are no rows in this table
Example Cost Summery
Tier
Active Users
Infra Cost
HR Cost
Total Monthly
Starter / MVP
1k–5k
$250 – $380
$1.8k – $3.2k
$2.05k – $3.58k
Growth
5k–25k
$670 – $920
$3.5k – $6.5k
$4.17k – $7.42k
Scale
25k–100k+
$1.1k – $1.68k
$6.5k – $12.5k
$7.6k – $14.18k
There are no rows in this table
Costs scale in two directions — infrastructure (based on traffic, usage, and region count) and human resources (based on the number of dedicated roles).
The biggest jump happens between 5k–25k users when you start regional scaling and introduce caching. GPU session hosting remains the key variable that affects profitability, especially under a subscription model.
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