I have a hard time believing a service like this wouldn't have employed at least one person full time. There is no way it cost anywhere remotely in the neighborhood of $10 a day.
However.
Let's not kid ourselves that this program probably cost upwards of several million dollars.
- Wired cut my access just before I was able to cite, but someone said the program cost "just tens of thousands of dollars a year, because equipment had already been purchased". The cost of procure install and maintenance I would imagine was wildly excessive.
> Let's not kid ourselves that this program probably cost upwards of several million dollars.
That's completely within the realm of possibility. I'd be surprised if you could set up any program at a federal level with less funding than that. 2 million dollars is a 25 man team if salaries and overhead are $80,000 per head. I really have no insight into what these kinds of programs cost, but I guarantee there is no way you're standing up servers in 100+ embassies for $10 a day.
> Wired cut my access just before I was able to cite
This is the same as not citing a source at all. Another user commented [0] that each of these servers cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $180,000 to $250,000 just to set up.
Maybe. I churn out solutions and designs based on fragmented tickets and hearsay user feedback all day long.
I imagine public Internet or Starlink would suffice to upload daily readings. But sure, that's speculation from someone who knows nothing about how it works.
The costs of this equipment get amortized for the duration of the equipment's useful life, so you can't just throw that away. Even if we do though, $10 is still too low of an estimate. For sake of argument, let's assume there was one guy running the entire network, part time, for half an hour per day. He will at minimum be making $30 an hour, add another %25 on top of that to account for overhead costs, so $37.50. $37.50 / 2 = $18.75. We're already over your threshold.
If other estimates that this equipment is in the realm of $200,000 per node to set up (that's presumably not just the cost of the server and other equipment but also the cost of delivering the equipment and standing it all up in the embassy), assuming 100 nodes you're talking about a $200,000,000 program just in capital costs. Amortized over a 10 year life span, assuming linear depreciation, the amortization costs alone are $3,650 per day, and that isn't including maintenance.
And yes, $10 is hyperbole, but we have AWOS (automatic weather observation systems) at airports all over the USA. I wonder how much it costs to transmit data from those.
If not, why isn't tailscale free for everyone?