[Important] Catbox Needs Your Help

Heyooo. It hasn't been too long since the last blog post, but this one's going to be a lot more important... and quite a bit longer.

tl;dr - Patreon deleted my page, refused to elaborate, and Catbox is now short $1,300~ in reoccurring income to pay the bill. Support Catbox Here

What Happened

In the early morning of May 20th, I received two email notifications from Patreon and Ko-fi, informing me that both of my accounts were suspended for "material that falls outside the bounds of [their] Community Guidelines" and "a violation of [their]Terms Of Service or Content Guidelines", respectively.

Naturally, after submitting appeals to both of them, and waiting 24 hours, I received two different results, both with unsatisfying amounts of answers:

Okay, cool, so Patreon is telling me to go fuck myself, and Ko-fi is at least willing to play ball. I responded to Ko-Fi with a bit more in depth of the systems Catbox uses to monitor uploads for malicious content, and they reinstated my Ko-fi account on Thursday, May 22nd.

Unfortunately, there is only $20 of monthly support coming through Ko-fi. Patreon was Catbox's primary source of income, at around $1,300 per month. I have not updated Catbox's cost breakdown since 2022, and there have been slight changes. Below is the new breakdown, including agreements I have with other services that provide some small funding towards Catbox:

For those not keeping track, that means without Patreon, Catbox is running at a deficit of about $1,388/month. Hardware Sharing Contracts are typically deducted from the Datacenter Colo cost, which is why it has always appeared lower on the breakdowns.

I've received many emails over the years regarding the cost of datacenter colocation, including things like "why is it so high", "why don't use you [insert cloud provider here]". The reason I colocate my own hardware is for multiple reasons, including the reason for this post. I can manage my own hardware (I'm actually smart sometimes!), upgrade it with 1-off costs (instead of needing to change plans, increasing monthly costs, etc), purchase new hardware when needed, and plan accordingly. I also don't have to worry about getting my service suspended by providers like Cloudflare or other shitty dedicated server providers who balk at the first abuse report. I have been colocating Catbox's hardware in a full size cabinet in downtown LA for the last 7 years. A majority of that time has been on dedicated 10gbps service, and running at full power. To both host 130+ TB of data, and push 1 petabyte of traffic per month on any cloud provider would be, quite frankly, impossible.

What Happens Now

That being said, I have finished the replacement to Patreon - I'm cutting out the middlemen, and now you can support Catbox monthly, directly! As well as get some new, better bonuses than what was previously offered on Patreon!

Supporting Catbox Directly

You can now visit the Catbox Store and find 3 options for supporting Catbox directly. Each support tier has different bonuses for support, stacking upon the previous.

Catbox has enough float to cover the server bill that was due on the 1st of June, however does not have the money to float for another 2 months. I need to recoup the $1,300 in monthly income from Patreon, and if all of the previous $7 and $15 Patrons re-pledged at Tier 2, that would be enough to make it there!

I hope that you can help me reach this goal, not just for the future of Catbox, but for the future of the free Internet. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me directly.

Happy 10th Birthday Catbox!

I'm pretty bad at keeping to posting on Catbox's actual birthday (April 6th), however, fear not! I am here!

Once again I am not the best at posting about updates or changes, however there have been quite a few updates and upgrades in the last year! We moved cabinets again to higher voltage service (to support the massive amounts of hard drives needed). Catbox's primary server was upgraded to have way more processing power, as well as storage. Speaking of storage, here's the current breakdown!

I also launched a new service (paid), Catbox Spaces! You can read more about it here.

Thank you to all of my supporters who have not only pledged on Patreon but also Ko-fi, as well as those who've purchased merch! Catbox has been almost entirely self sufficient this year (with the exception of some administrative stuff like domain renewals and taxes)!

This year's art was done by 1Her0!

Introducing Catbox Spaces! + Server Upgrades!

Hi there!

As we approach Catbox's 10th birthday (jeez I've been at this for a while.), I wanted to share something I've been working on in sort-of secret last year - Catbox Spaces!

Catbox Spaces

Catbox Spaces is a new, paid service I've been developing to help content creators share their content with their followers. It's designed to be a content publishing platform separated from social media sites and payment/subscription processors (as Catbox generally has a more… sensible Terms of Service/Acceptable Use Policy). A content creator who owns a Space can create content packs that can be viewed on the site, with measures taken to restrict downloading/hotlinking of the images. You can also create password protected content packs. This can be taken even further by tying your space in with your Patreon or SubscribeStar account to have access based on pledge tier. The Space is highly customizable too, letting you style it how you want. You can also see view statistics for not just your Space, but individual content packs too. Further planned features include automatic Glaze anti-AI protection, custom CSS (for those that want to get really in-depth with their customization), and more!

Note that the funding and expenses that I incur from this new endeavor is completely separate from Catbox's. Catbox will remain user funded, and user expense driven. Don't worry, I'm not going to become some big corpo. I've just seen what's been happening recently with sites like Imgur, Tumblr, and others heavily restricting NSFW content. I've even been seeing sporadic reports that Mega has been purging folders of NSFW content. That's one of the great things about Catbox Spaces - I'm not a corporation (well, technically Catbox LLC is, but it's just me!), plus, I actually care! Did you know I read about 4 abuse/content reports a day for Catbox? And I handle each one individually. Bet you Mega doesn't do that.

If you have any questions, please reach out to me via email! I am more than willing to answer any questions. Thank you all again for your support!

Server Upgrades

I've been a little quiet on here regarding upgrades, but I assure you that Catbox continues to grow - both physically and logically! As we've increased in size, so has the need to add additional storage. Some of you may have noticed the brief downtime back on the 26th of January - that was me putting in a new, larger, and much more powerful server for Catbox! Unfortunately I wasn't able to put it into production, but I am aiming to do so either this weekend or next! The new server brings with it new, redundant SSD storage for critical files, as well as a dedicated 87 TB of disk space for user files. Combined with the storage array that's currently attached to the old server, that brings Catbox's total on-premise storage capacity to 162 TB!

Happy 9th Birthday Catbox!!

Back at it again with another year!

I know there have been no blog posts or updates, but don't think that there's no development happening behind the scenes! We recently moved from our half-cabinet colocation into a full cabinet colocation! Also, we passed over 100 TB of hosted content! That's nearly double since August 2 years ago.

That being said, I wanted to thank everyone for not giving up on Catbox despite some setbacks regarding access. I won't lie, it's a little tough juggling a full time job and Catbox solo, but I make do! Here's to another year, and be on the lookout for more cool stuff on the horizon!

Also, here's 9 amazing pieces of art from 9 amazing artists!

Happy 8th Birthday Catbox!

Back at it again with another year!

I feel like I say it almost every year, but yes, the "development" of Catbox has been relatively stagnant. That isn't to say that the maintenance/advancement of it is as well. This year we upgraded one of the servers, as well as purchased a new SAN with an additional 50TB of storage, which should put us into a longer stability frame.

I've also looked at the results of the poll I put out a few months ago, and I'm very pleased with the results. Turns out a lot of people actually do like Catbox! Your suggestions were also very valuable, and I look forward to trying to implement some of them.

Finally, I'm looking into launching a new product sometime late this year that will help content creators and people alike with Catbox's goal of limitless filesharing. Stay tuned!

Art by Sauryanon

Financial Status

Update 8/17 - THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH. In just 8 days we've nearly reached the Patreon goal, and purchases of merchandise and cryptocurrency gifts have put us past the required funding for not just this month, but the next 3 months as well! The amount of generosity you guys have shown me has honestly touched my heart, and I am forever thankful. Catbox forever!

Heyoooo. It's been a while again.

tl;dr - Catbox needs additional funding. Keep reading.

This post is going to have a more somber attitude than posts in the past, and it's not one I've ever really wanted to make, but as Catbox has expanded, so has its costs. The operational costs for running Catbox per month for the last year have looked like this:

The large datacenter colocation bill is due to the fact that Catbox pushes an extreme amount of traffic. On average, Catbox pushes about 4 gbps, spiking up to 6 gbps.

This means I've had to acquire a 10gig internet uplink, which is not the cheapest thing to get. Additionally, Catbox is now hosting approximately 54 TB of content. As I'm sure many of you have encountered Lain, which is a project to basically offload inactive files to offsite storage, which can then be pulled back when a user requests. Catbox also utilizes various Cloud Server Providers (CSPs) to host external monitoring services and other servers. Finally, there are various administrative costs related to running Catbox, including email, legal paperwork, legal residences, and other small fees.

All of this has totaled into Catbox's monthly expenses to come out to $1,211. As of posting this blog post, Catbox is bringing in $696 per month. This means I am personally footing the remaining $515. Additionally, all server/firewall upgrades and purchases have also come out of my pocket. When I totaled up all expenses for 2021, Catbox was $7,070 in the negative. This means I put $7000+ dollars of my own money to prop Catbox up. This is not tenable for the future of Catbox.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that Catbox needs additional funding to survive long term. Our patrons on Patreon have been wonderful, and without them there is no doubt that Catbox would have been forced to close. However, it is clear that Patreon by itself is not capable of supporting the current or future growth of Catbox. This leaves me with 4 options:

You will of course notice that "Closing Catbox" is not an option on that list, and that's because it isn't. I would rather exhaust all other avenues of incoming before doing that, including traditional monetization. There are many people who have been using Catbox for the whole 7 years it's been around, and I know what it would mean to them to lose their files.

So this is my public begging post - I know the current economic climate isn't the greatest, and that many people have had to cut back on various things, including Patreon subscriptions, but given the traffic Catbox receives, if just 10% of users gave $5, we would be funded until the end of the year. So please, gift via Patreon, crypto, or if you want something more tangible, buy some stickers! I've created a new "Supporting" page to track Catbox's monthly expenses and income, as well as new ways to contribute. I look forward to another great year, and again, thank you not just to Patrons, but to everyone who has continued using Catbox.