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
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.
Thank you.
Travel is an issue. They use their own equipment at a server farm.
“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.