Reimbursement for e-NABLE infrastructure costs

Jeremy Simon Public Seen by 92

When I set up the Hub and e-NABLE Web Central on Azure hosting, it was done using a grant from Microsoft that covers $3500 per year in hosting services. However, over time, as the Hub has grown, our resource usage also grew, and we started to exceed the annual amount covered by the grant. At that time, Microsoft started charging my credit card, averaging around $500 per month.

Unfortunately, I didn't discover this for quite a few months. When the issue was identified, we made changes to the Azure billing setup to take advantage of reserved capacity. This resulted in a significant reduction in monthly costs.

In addition to Azure hosting, there is another service that I've been paying for called Mailgun, which is used to send transactional emails (i.e. email notifications for e-NABLE Web Central and the Hub). This service has been costing around $60 per month on average.

I'm seeking reimbursement from the e-NABLE Fund for the out-of-pocket costs of Azure and Mailgun over the last couple of years. I realize that it would have been better to proactively inform the community of these costs and get approval in advance, but I only recently became aware of the Azure fees. This is why I'm opening this for discussion... I really don't know what the most reasonable approach is here. It doesn't seem like it would be right for me to just absorb all of these costs. But it also might not be right for me to receive a full reimbursement since it took so long for me to report the issue. I would be open to whatever the community feels is appropriate. Perhaps a partial reimbursement is in order.

In the interest of full transparency, here is a summary of the investments I've made to support the e-NABLE community, including the Azure and Mailgun expenses outlined above. I am not seeking reimbursement for any of the items on this report other than the Azure and Mailgun costs.

Please share your thoughts in the comments. We do have a healthy balance in the e-NABLE Fund right now. How much, if any, of the $7,552.16 shown above would you be in favor of seeing reimbursed?

I'll be letting this run as a discussion for at least a week before putting forth a formal proposal.

Benjamin Lugo Velez Thu 21 Jul 2022 6:21PM

I only been here for a small time. But I can tell the work done is amazing. And you should get reimbursed.

Jeremy Simon Fri 22 Jul 2022 2:35PM

Thanks, Leland. I think there are very likely more cost-effective solutions we should explore. At the time, I was under the impression that the grant we received from Microsoft would cover all of the costs. But our hosting and data storage needs grew over time as we did more with the Hub and e-NABLE Web Central. I just lost sight of the growing monthly costs. Now that we're exceeding the amount Microsoft offers us in the grant, we should definitely explore alternatives.

Poll Created Fri 22 Jul 2022 2:38PM

Reimbursement for e-NABLE infrastructure costs Closed Fri 29 Jul 2022 2:00PM

Outcome

by Jeremy Simon Fri 29 Jul 2022 2:36PM

This proposal has been approved. Thanks very much for all of the kind comments! We have now switched these accounts over to an e-NABLE credit card, and we'll be exploring more cost-effective options going forward.