A3 Wiki (yaycupcake.com) Financial Situation

Hello everyone, and thank you for your continued support for the A3 Wiki (yaycupcake.com/a3) over the years. This is Sei, the head administrator of the wiki, and the one who foots the bills. I am writing this up to explain to you all the current financial situation of the wiki, and the steps we as a community will need to take in order to move forward.

I would like to preface everything I am about to say with the fact that I fully intend to do my best to keep the wiki up and running. I never wish for it to be lost, so I will do everything in my power to keep it afloat. However, I am currently unemployed, and do not have the financial means to keep it running forever, given the current situation of the wiki.

So here are the specifics. The wiki has grown a lot more than expected. I suspect a lot of it has to do with the English release of the game. There is a lot of traffic which has simply outgrown the old hosting package. The host company has asked me to upgrade the hosting to a VPS.

The difference in price, however, is quite large. Previously, the cost has been an annual charge of around $130. (Prices for hosting are provided to me in GBP, but as I am American, and exchange rates do fluctuate, I will be giving an estimate in USD, as that’s the price I will pay.) However, due to the increased traffic, and need for an upgrade to VPS, the charge would increase astronomically.

It would be more akin to around $55-70 per month. So the annual cost would be $660-840, if paid monthly.

That’s a LOT of money, and not something I can pay out of pocket anymore!

This is where Patreon comes in. I already have a Patreon set up, and it’s doing fairly well. However, it’s used to raise funds for multiple projects of mine, so not everything is used for yaycupcake.com. For full disclosure, I have a server where I run some reddit and discord bots from, which costs me $70/yr, and I also pay for the yaycupcake.com domain name with these funds. The domain name is relatively inexpensive, at around $15/yr though.

Currently, I make around $50/mo on Patreon every month. However. This does not take into consideration the fees involved. After fees, it is fairly significantly less. Ideally, I’d be able to purchase the $70/mo plan, which would provide better performance for the site. So I’d really need to raise about $80/mo at least. Also, considering that anyone who pledges on patreon can retract their pledge at any given time, I can’t rely on cutting it close every month. It would be best if I could have a small reserve of funds for one to two months in advance, at the very least.

Currently, I have only around $20 in reserve funds for the site.

I have a transparency spreadsheet located here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTfS7YjRCWoNIxOLTgIiGjqnJ_wpAUmrVCcs5DxJaQPm_XuQAPLoRDkIw0EsyFJqpfl54eeC1rsa9DD/pubhtml

Please note that the values listed here do not take into consideration fees and taxes! So the amount I pay is actually slightly more, and the amount I receive is actually slightly less.

Note that there is an option to pay annually, which is slightly less expensive – $500-700 annually. However, I am unable to pay this out of pocket up front, so I would need to secure such funds ahead of time. Otherwise, we’d need to pay the monthly fees.

For a bit of background, I started the A3 Wiki project essentially on a whim, back on the day the game first launched in Japan. I created a small Discord server with a couple mutuals from Twitter. That’s how it all began. We started talking, and were like, “hey, we should create a wiki for this game”. It really had rather humble beginnings, but it obviously grew to something much bigger than we could have ever expected.

I am sure some people will ask, why not use something like Fandom? Well, their technology is rather outdated, for one, and additionally, it doesn’t offer the freedom to use a lot of the database-related extensions we use, nor would it allow the use of our current story reader view. Self hosting has provided us a lot of freedom, and also allowed you, the visitors, to browse the wiki ad-free. I’m sure we can all agree that Fandom’s ad-bloat is something nobody is particularly a fan of. If it comes to the point where ads are necessary on the A3 Wiki, I promise it will never get to the point where the ads are intrusive or bloated. That’s the absolute last thing I want to do, as it goes against the core reason I took up the responsibility of hosting this wiki to begin with. Additionally, from the feedback I’ve received over the years, I’ve gotten a lot of appreciation for hosting an ad-free wiki, so migrating onto a platform riddled in ads is something I definitely do not wish to do.

As a slight aside, I would like to mention that yaycupcake.com is a website which does not host only the A3 Wiki, but also some other resources, most notable of which is the Fire Emblem Heroes Special Maps Guide site (yaycupcake.com/feh). However, I am creating this writeup today from the main perspective of the A3 Wiki, as that is the directory which has by far the most traffic, and is the main reason that an upgrade to the hosting has become neccessary. I will note that at present, all the resources on the site currently live and coexsit together. At some point, it may prove beneficial to separate them into separate hosting or domains, however at the moment, it’s simply most cost and time efficient to keep them together, as-is.

I fully wish to – and intend to – continue supporting the A3 Wiki, FEH Special Map Guides, and other smaller parts of my site. However, I really do need your help.

If you are financially able to, and enjoy content on the A3 Wiki, please consider pledging to my Patreon, located at patreon.com/yaycupcake.

Any amount genuinely can and will help, even if it’s only $1/mo. Please remember that this wiki is not running ads, and is financially managed by one individual (myself). I don’t wish to get rich off of this, I simply want to be able to continue providing this resource to you, the community. But I can’t do it alone.

Contact Information

If you need to contact me for any reason, regarding this situation, with any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me via one of the channels below:

My DMs are open to anyone on both.

Closing

Thank you so much for your support and understanding. I may need to update this document if there was anything I’ve missed. But hopefully I’ve covered the most important things. Once again, I can’t do this without your support.

Updates (none yet, will be posted below if there are any)