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What it costs to keep the lights on

Everything Kith makes is free, and it stays free. There is no paywall here and there never will be. But the machine, the names and the tools that build all this do cost money, so here is the bill, in the open, the same way we’d tell you what a schematic really needs.

Every month

WhatPer month
The workbench A Claude subscription. Kith is one person building on evenings, and this is the difference between a tool a month and a tool a year. $100
Electricity The server isn’t in a data centre. It’s a machine on a shelf in my house, awake all night, every night, running the Discord bots, the resource scraper and the uptime watch. About sixty watts around the clock, at the nineteen cents a kilowatt-hour we pay here. $8
The names kith-swg.com, and the old blueshift-swg.com kept alive so nobody’s old bookmark breaks. Twelve dollars a year each, shown here as a monthly share. $2
Roughly $110

It moves a little month to month. A busy week in the studio costs more than a quiet one. Nobody is paid anything. The building is done for love and stubbornness, on evenings, and that part isn’t on the bill.

And once, up front

The machine Bought once, so the town could stop renting a stranger’s server in a data centre and live somewhere I can actually reach. It should last years. That figure is what these parts cost to buy used today rather than what I paid for them; memory has climbed a long way since. Nobody needs to help with this one; it’s here because a bill with a piece missing isn’t an open bill. Ryzen 7 3700X, 8 cores · Gigabyte X570 · 32 GB RAM · 500 GB NVMe + 112 GB SSD · Ubuntu 26.04 LTS $455

Who pays it

I do, out of pocket, and I’d keep paying it if nobody ever read this page. Kith was never built to make money. It exists because a handful of us got tired of guessing at resource stats and sketching builds on notepads at work.

If you ever want to help

There’s a tip jar on Ko-fi. One-off or a couple of dollars a month, whichever suits. You can stop a monthly one yourself, any time, without asking me.

And if you never do: genuinely, nothing changes. Nothing here is locked, nothing is slower, nothing is missing, and there is no supporter tier — because the moment money buys something, the tools stop being free for everyone else. Using them, filing a bug, or telling somebody in general chat that they exist is worth more to this than a fiver.