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: Blockchain Explorer for Substrate-Based Chains

Overview: Subscan is a blockchain explorer for Substrate-based chains like Polkadot, Kusama, Westend, and Rococo.
Growth: The service has seen an increase in users but faces challenges in maintaining infrastructure stability.
Financial Need: Subscan is seeking financial support from the Polkadot Treasury to cover infrastructure costs.
Service Metrics: Traffic and API usage data show that Polkadot, Kusama, Westend, and Rococo are the main users.
Billing: Subscan's infrastructure costs for June, July, and August 2021 totaled $23,893, with Compute Engine being the largest expense.
Request: Subscan is requesting 568 DOT (approximately $16,725) to support its operations.
Transparency: Subscan has launched a service status page to provide real-time metrics and incident reports.
References: Subscan for Polkadot Network and Subscan Service Status are available online.