150 HBD a Day: An Honest Ask to Keep Ecency Running

We have reduced the Ecency proposal again, from 200 HBD per day to 150 HBD per day. That is roughly $4,500 a month for everything Ecency runs and maintains and it is about 55% less than the amount we originally asked for.

This is the fourth reduction. We went from 333 to 250 in early June, from 250 to 200 later that month and now to 150. Each time, we cut the request only after we had actually cut what it costs us to operate, not before. We are not going to ask the community for a number we cannot justify.

We also want to be honest about the rest of the picture, because you deserve the full version and not just the good half.

The revenue we built is not enough yet

Over the past months our team shipped real ways for Ecency to earn its own way. Ecency Pro. Hosted blogs and community sites. Card payments on the web. The Points economy and the paid features around it. This was deliberate: we would much rather be funded by people choosing to pay for something useful than by asking the community for support every year.

Those products work. They are live, people use them and they bring in real money.

They do not yet bring in enough. Not close enough to carry the infrastructure, the support load and the maintenance that Ecency requires every single month. Building a product is fast. Building revenue that can hold up a decade old service used by thousands of people every day is slow and we are early in that curve. We would be misleading you if we said otherwise.

So the honest position is this: the revenue side is real but unproven at the scale we need and until it gets there, the gap is covered by proposal funding or it is covered by cuts.

Right now the proposal is not funded

The Ecency proposal currently sits below the return proposal on the Hive fund. On Hive, that means it receives nothing at all. Not a reduced amount, nothing.

Closing that gap needs a meaningful amount of Hive Power to move in behind it.

You have already seen what unfunded looks like, because we have been living it. We shut down our own full Hive node, one of our largest single costs and rebuilt how the app talks to public nodes so that you would not feel it. We retired a regional web server. We cut the team by 75%. We reduced our operating footprint by every means we could find that did not damage the product.

Those decisions bought time. They did not solve the problem.

What 150 HBD a day actually pays for

This is not a growth budget. It is not a hiring budget. It is not a marketing budget. There is no expansion in this number.

The expensive part of Ecency in 2026 is not writing new features. It is everything that has to happen whether or not anyone writes a line of code:

• Keeping the web app, the mobile apps and the supporting services online and responsive.

• Security updates and dependency maintenance across a large open source codebase, on time, every time.

• Abuse prevention and fraud filtering on signups, which quietly protects the whole chain and not only us.

• Answering real people with real problems, by email and in chat, including account recovery and key trouble.

• The shared services other Hive projects and users depend on, which have never been billed to anyone.

New development still happens, but the honest description of our current pace is slow and deliberate. Fix what is broken, harden what is fragile, ship improvements when they are ready and do not commit to a roadmap we cannot fund. Given HIVE's price and the state of the market, we think that is the responsible posture and we would rather tell you that plainly than promise a bigger year than the money supports.

What we are asking

If you think Ecency should keep running, please vote for the proposal.

Voting costs you nothing. It does not spend your Hive Power, it does not lock or move your stake and you can remove it at any time. It simply lends your account's weight to the work you want to see continue. If you proxy your account to someone, the proxy carries your weight, so it is worth checking who you are proxied to and where they stand.

You can vote here: ecency.com/proposals/379

If voting is not enough for you, the other things that genuinely help are:

• Use the paid features. Ecency Pro, hosted blogs and community sites, and Points fund the work directly, with no fund involved.

• Delegate Hive Power to @ecency. It backs free account creation, the curation trail and the resource credits that keep the apps usable for newcomers.

• Keep showing up. Post, curate, welcome people and report abuse. The infrastructure exists to serve an active network.

And if you think we should not be funded, vote accordingly. That is what community funding is for and we would rather be judged honestly than supported out of politeness.

What you can hold us to

We will keep reducing the ask whenever we can genuinely reduce our costs, as we have done four times now. We will keep publishing what we spend it on. If funding does not improve, we will keep cutting everything else before we let the main app go dark, because the front door staying open for the community comes first.

Ten years in, Ecency is still here, still open source, still free to use and still without ads on your content. We would like the next ten to look the same. Whether that happens is genuinely up to the people who use it.

Thank you to everyone who has voted, subscribed, delegated, argued with us in the comments and kept us honest.

Your blog, your keys.