Personnel costs

This page is a short description of the costs that we cover with service fees in order to sustain our service. If you’re interested in cloud costs (which we pass through directly to communities), see Cloud costs.

Our biggest cost is paying salaries for team members that carry out the services we provide. This includes cloud operations and development, open source support, guidance and support for our communities, etc.

See also

You can find more about our compensation philosophy in our compensation and benefits page.

At present, we choose monthly hub fees based on assumptions about how many hubs an engineer can operate and support. We assume this is the primary bottleneck that limits our capacity. This gives us an “engineering cost per hub” and we use this as a base to estimate the extra fees we need to charge to cover the non-engineering roles that are needed for the service.

• Cost of a 2i2c engineer. If we assume that a 2i2c engineer is paid $140,000/year, with a 30% benefits markup. This covers the design, development, and ongoing operation of cloud infrastructure for 2i2c’s hubs.

• Community support fees. We add a 10% markup to cover 2i2c’s extra costs in providing ongoing support and community guidance for our hubs. This includes communications and guidance for community representatives as well as support for hub issues.

• Open source support fees. We add a 10% markup to cover 2i2c’s extra costs in ongoing open source engagement and support. This includes upstreaming contributions to open source projects, community engagement and leadership, and collaboration and planning.

• Fiscal sponsor fees. We add a 15% markup to cover the fee of our fiscal sponsor, Code for Science and Society (for see for information about the services that CS&S provides).

The result is roughly $250,000 annually for each engineering position. The fees for each hub are thus determined by dividing this annual cost by the estimated number of hubs of a given type that we can realistically support.