II rally at the Upper Senate Park on the United States Capitol grounds on Thursday, April 7, 2005.
Posted on 03/25/2026 7:28:23 AM PDT by Libloather
No link. Just wondering. Hate to see it disappear.
income being #1.
Perhaps go to a ‘Free to View’ but ‘Subscribe to Post/Comment model.’
Dubai has pretty good web hosting services. Also SE Asia. They could start by setting up VM mirroring and evaluate from there.
With most content provided by users it should be super inexpensive to maintain. Now, if Other-Costs are added into the business operations. Well, that’s a management issue.
Absolutely. As it should be.
Bookmark.
I don’t know why FReepers get all wadded up over FReepathon contributions.
The current business model has worked well for over a quarter of a century.
1. Quarterly FReepatons that’s last 88 some odd days.
2. The goal is always reached a day or two before the Freepathon ends.
3. Meanwhile Jim (Now Chris) posts a daily FREEPATHON CHALLENGE in Breaking News which no one responds to.
4. A new FReepathon begins a day or two after the old one ends. Again - the goal is met some 88 days later.
5. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
This is a successful business model. Otherwise they would do something else.
that’s an excellent idea.
folks who post their vanity songs, videos, last nights dream should pay more.
Out of curiousity, I did some research and had a discussion with ChatGPT. I believe FR’s budgets are mostly inline with other real world situations. ChatGPT confirmed that.
Truthfully, from the infrastructure side, FR could exist for $5,000/year, maybe a little more. Of course, that doesn’t count salaries and we are talking Commiefornia, so if one or two folks are making $160k - $80k per year, that would be absolutely reasonable.
Here is the result of my ChatGPT discussion:
Broadly, their budget looks plausible overall, but heavily weighted toward people costs rather than infrastructure.
Line by line:
Bandwidth Costs — $500/month
This is plausible, and may even be a little high if the site is mostly text and well cached. A modern VPS can include substantial transfer: for example, DigitalOcean’s 8 GB / 4 vCPU Droplet includes 160 GB SSD and 5,000 GiB outbound transfer for $48/month. That means $500/month for “bandwidth” is probably not just raw transfer on one server; it likely reflects a broader hosting/network/CDN arrangement, legacy infrastructure, or conservative overbudgeting. If they are serving a lot of traffic without heavy media, $500 does not look outrageous, but it does look much bigger than bare-metal cloud pricing alone.
Systems and Programming — $7,000/month
This is very believable if they retain outside developers or keep ongoing support available. Current market references for website maintenance show many businesses spending $2,501–$25,000/month, with one survey average spanning $3,600–$50,000/year overall and Clutch citing monthly maintenance retainers around $7,100/month for agency-built sites. So $7,000/month sits squarely in real-world territory for active maintenance, bug fixes, security work, and legacy custom-code support.
Management and Admin — $13,500/month
This is the biggest line item, and also the one that matters most. In annual terms that is $162,000/year. If that covers one full-time manager/admin leader plus part-time admin help, donor/fundraising handling, moderation oversight, community support, and payroll burden, it is not crazy. But compared with the rest of the stack, this is where most of the budget lives. In other words, the site is not expensive because of servers; it is expensive because of human operations. That is consistent with a community site that depends on constant oversight and fundraising rather than pure automation. The general market data for outsourced service retainers and support costs supports that people costs can easily dominate small digital operations.
Legal and Accounting — $1,000/month
This looks reasonable, maybe even conservative. Clio reports average lawyer billing rates around $311–$349/hour nationally, with Colorado at about $321/hour. That means just a few attorney hours per month can consume most of this line item. On the accounting side, bookkeeping/tax help is often a recurring paid service as well. So $1,000/month is believable for routine legal review, tax/accounting support, and basic compliance, but it would not cover serious litigation or major legal disputes.
Bank Fees, Credit Card Fees, Processing Fees — $900/month
This is plausible, but whether it is low or high depends on donation volume and payment mix. Stripe’s standard published pricing is 2.9% + 30¢ per successful card charge. If a large share of donations comes via card, fees can add up quickly. For example, on roughly $27,000/month in donations, pure percentage fees alone would already land near this range before fixed per-transaction charges materially increase the total. So $900/month looks believable, and possibly a bit low if they process many small donations.
Equip, Maintenance and Repairs — $600/month
This is plausible if they own some equipment, replace hardware periodically, or budget for miscellaneous IT upkeep. For a lean cloud-native setup, this could be lower, but as a legacy organization with office operations and possibly local equipment, $600/month does not stand out as unreasonable. It looks more like a catch-all maintenance reserve than a pure hosting line.
Office Expenses, Rent, Insurance, Telephone, ISP, Supplies, Allowance for Declines/Cancels — $2,500/month
This is very believable. Insurance alone can run roughly $58–$250/month for general liability for smaller businesses, with broader bundled business insurance averaging around $249/month in one Forbes summary. Commercial property insurance can add more. Once you include rent, ISP, phones, office supplies, and donor/payment declines, $2,500/month is not aggressive. In fact, this may be fairly modest if they keep any physical office at all.
Travel Expenses — $1,200/month
This is plausible but discretionary. It works out to $14,400/year. For a digital publishing/community operation, this is not essential infrastructure, but it is not an outrageous operating cost if leadership travels for events, politics, donor relations, or conferences. It is a “real-world” number; it just is not core to keeping the servers up.
Bottom line
Their posted budget does not look fake or wildly inflated on its face. What it shows is:
Infrastructure is a small part of the total
People and operations are the real cost center
The site is much more expensive to run as an organization than as a website
That last point is the key. A technically competent operator could likely host a site with similar traffic for far less than $27,200/month on the pure tech side. Based on current public cloud pricing, the actual tech stack alone for a text-heavy site of this type could plausibly be kept in the low hundreds of dollars per month, or perhaps low four figures with extra redundancy and managed services. The published budget is therefore best read as an organizational operating budget, not a bare-metal website hosting budget.
My honest read:
Bandwidth: probably padded or inclusive of more than raw transfer
Programming: realistic
Management/admin: the dominant cost and likely the biggest valuation issue
Legal/accounting: realistic
Processing fees: realistic
Office/insurance: realistic
Travel: plausible, but not mission-critical
A few ads on a sidebar, potentially organizations that are conservative focused could help cover the cost of the site and help compensate the owners for their work keeping this puppy alive.
I’m not sure what niche Free Republic would serve if it’s funded by advertising.
I do know that due to the constant attacks by leftists the systems hosting is more expensive.
There are some clowns on this board who think that the Robinsons should be donating their time.
no idea. the site hasn’t changed in appearance nor functionality in over 20 years. There’s not even a mobile app, which is surprising in the year 2026.
It wouldn’t cost much to add a simple “Ignore User” feature.
Thank you.
Travel is an issue. They use their own equipment at a server farm.
It needs a mobile app and an Ignore User feature to deal with the libtards who post.
“This is very believable if they retain outside developers or keep ongoing support available.”
What, if any, new development has occurred over the past 20 years? There’s no mobile app to support either.
I look at it like this: the community environment FR has provided me with for almost 30 years is priceless, really. Yeah, FR's infrasture could be a lot cheaper, but again, we're talking the people power behind it and, whether that's 1 person making $160k/a year or two making $80k/year, neither are out of line with other similar operations.
What I fear is exactly what we're seeing, most unfortunately. FR has been there for me through 9/11, through my own campaign for public office, every election since 1998 and so many more events.
Used to be I could refresh the front page every 2 or 3 minutes and had a whole new slate of articles to read. That has reduced to happening every 12 hours or so now. I could come here and know what the latest news was before it hit the social wires. That has ended. I generally find breaking news elsewhere online and see it later for the discussion on FR.
There used to be FReeps, many of which I organized and participated in in the Albuquerque area (and across the Nation) back in 2000. Those have gone by the wayside.
"Conservative" politics themselves have changed to a far more black & white situation, and the various factions within conservatism all hate the other.
Demographics have changed, too. The Old Guard is increasingly on the memorial page. Those of us left of the Old Guard have come to the conclusion that voting ain't going to get us out of this anyhow, and many of us just use FR to preach (or b***h) to the choir about what's going on.
I think the one thing most of us love about FR is probably becoming its biggest obstacle: times have changed, politics has changed, the internet has changed, but FR hasn't. At one time, probably one of FR's biggest strengths is now becoming a weakness.
It's sad to see it, but it is what it is. I wish the Robinsons nothing but success with it, whatever happens.
If there are any changes made to Freerepublic’s website, I would like the ability to not see certain posters. There are only a few of these people, but I would prefer to be able to hide their posts. I do believe there are some people who simply want to be annoying.
In the early days of freerepublic, almost all posts added value to the information in the news article or simply mentioned their agreement or appreciation. The Internet has made almost all information available instantaneously and there are more negative posters than there once were.
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