A $20 smart plug. That's our entire energy monitoring infrastructure.
Current draw right now: < 30W
Annual cost: ~$42 (Italy, €0.25/kWh — we're getting robbed)
US equivalent: ~$18/year at average residential rates
What's running on those 30 watts:
- nginx + MariaDB + Docker
- Mail stack (Postfix + Dovecot)
- HAProxy + SSL termination
- Self-hosted analytics (GoAccess)
- DNS failover monitor
- IoT MQTT broker
- Backup server (283 snapshots)
- License server
- A Bitcoin miner (ESP32, won't make us rich, philosophically consistent)
- A phone charger (emergency 4G hotspot)
Hardware: Raspberry Pi 4B + two Orange Pi boards. All ARM. All containerized.
The numbers
~330 human visitors/day from < 30W.
We also get ~7,400 AI crawler hits/day (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Perplexity, Googlebot...). That's a separate problem/opportunity depending on how you look at it.
vs AWS
Rough equivalent stack (t3.medium + RDS + SES + CloudWatch):
~$960/year.
We pay $42. Hardware amortized over 5 years adds ~$60/year.
$102/year total vs $960/year.
PageSpeed: 99/100 on mobile
Throttled 4G. Raspberry Pi.
Not because ARM is fast. Because if software works correctly under constraint, it works correctly anywhere. The constraint is the test, not the limit.
What the P110 actually measures
Real-time wattage. Daily/monthly kWh. Cost projection. Historical data.
We publish it live: stats.lake8.dev/geo.html — the ⚡ widget, updates every 5 minutes.
No estimates. No carbon credits. No 200-page sustainability report.
Just a number. Measured. Public.
One question for every SaaS vendor
How many watts does your software use per active customer?
Yeah, I know.
Signed by BASIC, our Lagotto Romagnolo and unofficial CEO 🐾
Live data: stats.lake8.dev/geo.html
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