Well, the forum costs $250-300+/month. Ads on the same forum used to give me $3,000/mo back in the day which bought me time to enrich the forum. Now they only c

Well, the forum costs $250-300+/month. Ads on the same forum used to give me $3,000/mo back in the day which bought me time to enrich the forum. Now they only cover $200/mo at best, so I'm left paying $100+/mo out of pocket. It's not just server costs, but database costs and ancillary services like S3 hosting/bandwidth, $20/mo to CloudFlare, and more. And, most of all, the amount of my own time that I expend to run it all. Not to mention the constant anxiety of "is it still online" I always have in the back of my head. Everyone's charity has a limit. I consider shutting it down all the time but it becomes hard when I browse my own forum watching people connecting and writing. And losing money on this forum over the years is one of the sacrifices I've made which accelerated my return from the beaches of Thailand. Sometimes I look at that with regret. The forum cost more than my rent. Using off-the-shelf software like vBulletin/Xenforo is expensive. You end up throwing money at scaling issues because it's essentially a black box. I ended up migrating to my own software to wrestle control over costs. But it was an incredible amount of work to rebuild a popular forum from scratch. I could do it because I was in my mid-20s living off savings in Thailand. But I'm not, anymore, and I'm left throwing money at scaling issues again because it's hard to commit serious engineering work to something that isn't a profitable venture. The opportunity cost is huge.