Cat's Arch

I don't want your money!

Please, if you clicked on this with the intention of donating then read this.

I don't want your money! This is one of my hobbies. I gladly pay for everything because I find it fun, it's taught me a ton, and it continues to introduce me to new things! I can easily pay for these things and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. However, I absolutely thank you for even considering sending money my way.

If you really want to support me then check out the contact info in the footer and send me a nice email or something! A little positive interaction goes a long way to keep me motivated and show me that more than just bots are seeing and using something I've put so much time into.

I also don't want to take money so that I don't feel I owe it to anyone to keep hosting specific services or always be doing constant work on any of this. So to keep it stress free I won't accept direct donations.

However, I absolutely wouldn't complain about a reduced bill so I do provide a few affiliate/referral links (that don't cost you anything extra) for some services I use, alongside my honest opinion about that service in the affiliate/referral links section.

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My costs

Last updated 8/26/26

Here's a quick breakdown of my costs. Pay attention to the frequency of each one because they aren't all the same.

That comes out to roughly $33.17 USD a month or $398.04 USD a year.

updown.io can also vary based on exchange rate since it's originally priced in euros, plus even more depending on how many monitors I have active and how frequent they check. So sometimes I can wait longer to buy more credits, or need to buy them sooner.

This might sound like a lot when you look at the yearly number, but I could work for only one day each month and be able to cover it with plenty extra! The domain is also already paid for up until July 25th, 2028.

My only other cost so far was $30.55 for 50 aged Twitter accounts to run Nitter. I've also considered buying some form of VPN but the ProtonVPN free tier has had me covered so far.

The domain is bought through Porkbun and the server is an OVHCloud Eco SYS-1.

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Affiliate/referral links

Below is my honest opinion about some of the services I use and a link to them that will get me some form of discount if you sign up and purchase something.

If you find anything else I should mention about these that I hadn't caught then please let me know! I don't wanna promote garbage.

• Services
• updown.io (external service checker)

updown.io

updown.io is what I use for external uptime monitoring of everything I host.

I really like their apdex feature since it can email me to let me know when things are performing poorly, which has actually been really useful!

However it's not unheard of for one of their servers to randomly start spiking in response times while the others stay normal, which can lead to false positives for the apdex score. It isn't a frequent problem though.

It does do really well for telling me when things are down, and can also be used to have internal servers poll them so you can get an alert when the server goes down without having to expose any of it's services.

The cost isn't bad either, you only consume credits if you're checking something and how fast you use those credits depends on how many checks you're doing and how often they're checking (1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes, etc). So I can slow down how often the servers get checked and save money, or disable some checks outright.

Here's my updown.io referral link. This link will give you an 100k extra credits on signup, and me 100k credits on your first purchase.

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