[Important] Catbox Needs Your Help
Heyooo. It hasn't been too long since the last blog post, but this one's going to be a lot more important... and quite a bit longer.
tl;dr - Patreon deleted my page, refused to elaborate, and Catbox is now short $1,300~ in reoccurring income to pay the bill. Support Catbox Here
In the early morning of May 20th, I received two email notifications from Patreon and Ko-fi, informing me that both of my accounts were suspended for "material that falls outside the bounds of [their] Community Guidelines" and "a violation of [their]Terms Of Service or Content Guidelines", respectively.
Naturally, after submitting appeals to both of them, and waiting 24 hours, I received two different results, both with unsatisfying amounts of answers:
Okay, cool, so Patreon is telling me to go fuck myself, and Ko-fi is at least willing to play ball. I responded to Ko-Fi with a bit more in depth of the systems Catbox uses to monitor uploads for malicious content, and they reinstated my Ko-fi account on Thursday, May 22nd.
Unfortunately, there is only $20 of monthly support coming through Ko-fi. Patreon was Catbox's primary source of income, at around $1,300 per month. I have not updated Catbox's cost breakdown since 2022, and there have been slight changes. Below is the new breakdown, including agreements I have with other services that provide some small funding towards Catbox:
Datacenter Colocation: $1,528/month
Upgrades/Hardware Maintenance: $100/month
Offsite Storage: $200/month
Cloud Server Providers: $40/month
Administrative Costs: $60/month
Hardware Sharing Contracts: $440/month
One-time support (incl. merch) (avg last 6 months): $80/mo
For those not keeping track, that means without Patreon, Catbox is running at a deficit of about $1,388/month. Hardware Sharing Contracts are typically deducted from the Datacenter Colo cost, which is why it has always appeared lower on the breakdowns.
I've received many emails over the years regarding the cost of datacenter colocation, including things like "why is it so high", "why don't use you [insert cloud provider here]". The reason I colocate my own hardware is for multiple reasons, including the reason for this post. I can manage my own hardware (I'm actually smart sometimes!), upgrade it with 1-off costs (instead of needing to change plans, increasing monthly costs, etc), purchase new hardware when needed, and plan accordingly. I also don't have to worry about getting my service suspended by providers like Cloudflare or other shitty dedicated server providers who balk at the first abuse report. I have been colocating Catbox's hardware in a full size cabinet in downtown LA for the last 7 years. A majority of that time has been on dedicated 10gbps service, and running at full power. To both host 130+ TB of data, and push 1 petabyte of traffic per month on any cloud provider would be, quite frankly, impossible.
That being said, I have finished the replacement to Patreon - I'm cutting out the middlemen, and now you can support Catbox monthly, directly! As well as get some new, better bonuses than what was previously offered on Patreon!
Supporting Catbox Directly
You can now visit the Catbox Store and find 3 options for supporting Catbox directly. Each support tier has different bonuses for support, stacking upon the previous.
Tier 1: Add 2 "QTs" to the image rotation (the images in the bottom right corner of the screen).
Tier 2: In addition to Tier 1, your max upload size is now 500 MB, and your max duration on Litterbox can be 7 days, as well as tracking uploads/deleting early.
Tier 3: In addition to Tier 2, your max upload size is now 1 GB.
Catbox has enough float to cover the server bill that was due on the 1st of June, however does not have the money to float for another 2 months. I need to recoup the $1,300 in monthly income from Patreon, and if all of the previous $7 and $15 Patrons re-pledged at Tier 2, that would be enough to make it there!
I hope that you can help me reach this goal, not just for the future of Catbox, but for the future of the free Internet. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me directly.
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