feddit.uk clocks in at under £40/month. That's hosting, and backups. lemmy.zip is similar.

Plus our time, but we're obviously doing it as a labour of love.

It depends. I run an instance with a whole two users and it costs me about $25 a month.

But if I let 200 users join, I would need beefier hardware and a higher bandwidth limit.

However running an instance like Beehaw is probably on the order of hundreds, not thousands of dollars a month.

You can rent an instance for like 10 dollars per month and grow from there. Then expand if you get users and things get slow. Lemmy runs ok on 4 GB of memory but it's better with 8 GB. Postgres use the most.

I'd certainly be interested to know for the sake of donations. I would gladly donate to keep the fediverse alive.

I'm curious as well. I want to selfhost a personal instance, but CGNAT is getting on the way. I can always pay for VPS, but then the recent shenanigans involving CSAM images potentially being synced from rogue instances scared me.