Raspberry Pi stack serves 330 users daily for just $42 a year in electricity
A small self-hosted server setup running on a Raspberry Pi 4B and two Orange Pi boards consumes under 30 watts and costs roughly $42 annually in electricity at Italian energy rates. The hardware runs a full production stack including nginx, MariaDB, Docker, a mail server, HAProxy, DNS monitoring, and an IoT MQTT broker, among other services. The team estimates a comparable cloud setup on AWS would cost around $960 per year, making their total all-in cost — including amortized hardware — about $102 annually versus nearly ten times that in the cloud. The project also fields approximately 7,400 AI crawler requests per day from bots like GPTBot and ClaudeBot, separate from its roughly 330 human visitors. Real-time power consumption and cost data are published publicly, updated every five minutes, as part of a deliberate philosophy around building efficient, constrained software.
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