Written with LLM assistance.
Details at end.
I’ve been meaning to do this for ages - a proper breakdown of where all the Patreon, GitHub, Paypal, and commercial sponsorship money goes to keep Compiler Explorer running.
TL;DR: we’re spending about $3,100 per month (~$37,000 annually) to serve around 8 million backend compilations monthly. That works out to roughly $0.00039 per compilation - shockingly good value!
Taking April 2025 as an example, our costs are split 80% on AWS costs ($2,550) and 20% on operational costs ($550); for a total of $3,100. The operational bit includes monitoring tools (Grafana, Papertrail, Sentry), my share of office costs whilst I’m between “real” jobs, and community expenses like the Discord server and shipping stickers to supporters.
Our infrastructure serves peak days of up to 1.66 million requests across x86_64, ARM64, and GPU platforms. We have a pretty impressive uptime for a bunch of amateurs (99.98% uptime in the last 30 days). And we genuinely don’t know who you are or what you’re compiling, which is important to me personally.
The traffic patterns are always interesting to look at - we see clear daily cycles with US daytime hours being busiest, weekend dips, and holiday lulls. January 2025 was our peak month at $3,345, showing how much extra it can cost at busier times.
We’ve done some work to get the most for our money out of AWS (Amazon Web Services, where most of our infrastructure is):
Compilation volumes are down from 14+ million monthly peaks in 2024 to around 8 million now, but infrastructure costs stay relatively steady. Daily builds of all the compilers require a certain fixed cost, and all the storage adds up too.
Monthly costs bounce around $3,100-3,300, with the occasional spike when everything gets busy. It’s a pretty manageable amount, though we do try to look for easy optimisation opportunities without breaking things.
I’m trying to be as transparent as possible here. I strongly believe Compiler Explorer is a project by the community for the community. I’ve put together a detailed cost report that breaks down every aspect of the infrastructure. The report covers seven months of data (October 2024 - April 2025) and shows exactly where every dollar goes. It’s probably very boring reading, but I think that transparency matters when you’re asking for community support.
One part the cost report doesn’t go in to is revenue. That breaks down as roughly:
I pay some amount of tax on those revenues (though my accountant does something clever), but I1 don’t pass that cost on to Compiler Explorer. Some of the surplus gets saved in a separate bank account. I still need to set up a business account and do all the paperwork etc to make it even more separate. Compiler Explorer isn’t a significant source of income for me: I’m just glad to be able to subsidise it with my time while I’m in between jobs.
To everyone supporting CE through Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, PayPal donations, or commercial sponsorship - thank you. This level of infrastructure wouldn’t exist without your support, and I hope this breakdown shows we’re being proportionate and respectful of those contributions.
The fact that we can serve 8 million compilations a month for $3,100 is still pretty amazing to me!
This article was a collaboration between a human and an LLM. I provided the detailed cost report (which also used LLM assistance, particularly with all the AWS queries needed) and asked Claude to help draft a blog post summarising the key points in my usual style. The LLM helped structure the content, and assisted me in proofreading and links.
Currently, at least. And probably very naively. ↩
Matt Godbolt is a C++ developer living in Chicago. Follow him on Mastodon or Bluesky.