The Infrastructure Costs of Subscan for Polkadot Network from June 2021 to August 2021

Past discussions: https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/post/610

Subscan is an aggregated Blockchain explorer for Substrate-based chains. We have supported several chains, such as Polkadot, Kusama, Westend, and Rococo, for more than one year. We have seen an encouraging trend in the number of users and their level of activity. However, with the rapid growth of users, stability and reliability in infrastructure are becoming a challenge. As a result, Subscan has to expend more resources to ensure the quality of the service.

In the long run, we foresee Subscan is being a financially independent service. Although Subscan is starting to generate some revenue, it currently falls short of supporting the infrastructure costs. Therefore, we are looking for financial support from Polkadot Treasury to help to continue providing a realiable explorer service to the community.

Current Service Scale of Subscan

Below are some metrics from Cloudflare and Subscan's monitoring system for the last few weeks.

Subscan traffic overview:

Subscan API traffic and distribution:

As the charts demonstrate, Polkadot, Kusama, Westend, and Rococo are the major user traffic of Subscan. This request-per-second value is showing a decreasing trend from ~80% the last time we submitted the proposal to ~70% currently.

We also launched the service status page in the last few months. In order to improve the transparency of the Subscan service, several core metrics of our backend have been published on it. Any user in the community is able to watch the incidents, scheduled maintenances, real-time request success rate, service response time graph, etc.

Billing Info

The infrastructure cost refers to what we have spent on Google Cloud Platform.

June 2021

Subtotal in June: $7,384.03

July 2021

Subtotal in July: $7,865.29

August 2021

Subtotal in August: $8,643.68

Total Amount

$7,384.03 + $7,865.29 + $8,643.68 = $23,893

Compute Engine, Cloud Logging, and Cloud SQL are the three primary services, among which Compute Engine alone constitutes around 70% of the total cost. Detailed billing info and other relevant proof are available upon request.

The estimated infrastructure cost we spent on Polkadot, Kusama, Westend, and Rococo adds up to $16,725 according to the request distribution chart. Therefore, the amount we are requesting is 568 DOT (1 DOT ≈ 29.40 $USD). Such support is indispensable for our goal to capitalize on economies of scale.

References

Subscan for Polkadot Network: https://polkadot.subscan.io/
Subscan Service Status: https://subscan.statuspage.io/

The source code of this proposal is hosted on GitHub.

Subscan is a tool that helps people explore different blockchain networks like Polkadot and Kusama. Here are some key points about it:

Subscan has been helping track blockchain activity for over a year.
It has many users, but the growing number is making it harder to keep the service stable.
Subscan needs more money to maintain its service and is looking for help from Polkadot Treasury.
In the last few months, the costs for running the service have been high, totaling around $23,893.
Most of the money goes to computing services to support its functions.
Subscan is starting to make some money but not enough to cover all its costs.
They have also created a service status page for users to check on performance and issues.
Subscan wants to be financially independent in the future.