I’ve seen other instances do this, so I figured I might as well too. Right now the instance is hosted on a relatively medium sized VPS with object storage. Lemmy uses very little resources, so I run some personal stuff on the server as well (like a screenshot hoster, blog, etc) but if I need to upgrade I can eventually.

VPS: $13.99

Object storage: as of right now it is $2.20 (and growing, slowly but surely)

I’m not opposed to donations, but it’s not required. The biggest cost is likely going to be object storage more and more.