Seriously, its a thankless job. Its so nice keeping the fediverse free in 2025/26.
now go forth and donate to the infrastructure, because renting hardware is not free.
but only if you are able to do so.
how much does it cost to host a lemmy instance
Not nearly as much as it “costs” to admin and moderate one.
You can get a decent VPS (Hetzner is well-liked) for ~$8 USD. Using an S3 bucket for media storage starts at a few cents per month and will grow from there based on how you set up media retention, but it’ll take a while for that to be a real cost. Plus whatever your domain costs (~$1-2/mo is pretty standard).
So all in probably about $10/mo.
That’s more than enough for a small instance, probably enough for a medium-sized instance too. Admins of the big instances probably have more info about what happens when you get huge.
Of course you could run it all on your own equipment at home for “free” too.
Relative to other Fediverse software it is expensive due to how much community federation and vote traffic drives up compute and storage needs.
The exact costs really depend on your location and if you are renting a server or run it on your own hardware. But I doubt you can run a well federated Lemmy instance for much less than 30€/month. Of course it initially runs on a much cheaper VPS, but once you start subscribing to remote communities it quickly needs more power and storage.
I did for a while on a pi 4 for fun. It worked. Now im hosting a piefed instance for fun.
On AWS EC2 its probably 5$ a month-ish for a single user instance. For anything else, not sure.
