2024 IT Service Fees - LF Projects
- Steve Ira
- Eric Searcy
PLEASE NOTE 2025 fees supercede the information on this page: https://linuxfoundation.atlassian.net/wiki/x/AwB1EQ
(Note: This document is for internal company reference only, and is not for sharing externally. See guidelines at the end of this page and for teams requiring communication externally (e.g. Formation Team)
Beginning January 2024 LF IT are updating IT service fees. Fee categories remain the same: collaboration and engineering services. Updates this year include the following general changes and guidelines:
- More accurate fee structure based on actual consumption of any given project. This is accomplished with integrations with LFX PCC backend data and other 3rd party API integrations reflecting deployed and running services.
- Adding cloud operations fees based on cloud pass thru costs - this was not recovered in the previous 5 years and is being added in 2024 to recover the cost of setup, maintenance, account and financial reconciliations and reporting for all LF OS projects.
- More equitable allocation based on consumption. Previously broad categories were used (small/medium/large) for collaboration services and in some cases projects were not using some of the category items (conversely, some were using more than a category level contained).
- Fees cover cost of service contracts and/or minimal administration costs to support those contracts. Fees do not cover development costs (e.g. LFX PCC or deployment of 3rd party tools and their integrations).
- IT continue to carry overhead contracts and services for the LF proper (e.g. Google Workspace, LF enterprise monitoring, productivity tools, identity, Cloud vendor fees, etc.) and with few exceptions there is no cross-departmental charging.
As a result of 2024 changes some project costs have risen, and some project costs have gone down. Generally speaking this is keeping with the range of category pricing used in previous years - just more accurately applied.
Collaboration Services Fees (monthly):
Service fees are assessed per-project, as defined in LFX PCC tool (includes child projects).
| Item | Base fee | Usage fee | Description / Guideline |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essentials (Domains) | $55 | $3.50 | Third party contracts for domain management, email forwarding, some monitoring and identity costs, and other basic costs to support project service desk. |
| Email Forwarding | $2 | n/a | Charged for each domain with this service. The first service-domain for each project is factored into the Essentials base fee and is not charged the $2 fee. Note: we are NOT capturing anything from projects using Google Workspace (setup/finance help and emergency-level access) We anticipate adding this to the model when we include support for Google Workspace "mailing list" management in PCC. |
| GitHub | $6 | $2 per organization | Business requirements need turn-over-protected, LF IT "ownership" of GitHub organizations. IT provides contingency-type support for recovering access to additional parties when turnover (community or PMO) results in lack of access for day-to-day operations. Occasional need to run "bulk" operations across all LF-owned organizations for compliance or automation needs. Includes org-level and repo-level affiliation to foundation and child-projects to support other business initiatives and reporting. |
| GitLab | $6 | $2 per group | See GitHub. |
| Meeting Management | $10 | $3 | We're using a "pooled" approach that shares "Zoom users" (meeting hosts) across projects for efficiencies, especially in allowing unfunded projects to be able to utilize existing resources already supported by funded projects. Fees include a base cost per month plus a usage fee per meeting. Sample monthly costs of a project using Meeting Management: Project hosting 50 meetings per month via PCC: $10 (monthly base fee) + $150 (50 meetings at $3) = $160 Meeting Management (via PCC with committees and LFID) is a strategic business component for the LF, supporting Member Engagement statistics for Executives around board meeting attendance, company engagement in technical communities, etc. This fee is only recovering actual zoom contract costs and some vendor management overhead. It does not cover costs for development and operations for PCC and ITX. |
| Zoom accounts | $10 | plus $23 per licensed Zoom host user | This is the previous "dedicated Zoom user login credentials" accounts that provided projects with the ability to host Zoom meetings (and LFID-enabled webinars, which are not supported LFX/PCC meeting management yet) in a way that decouples them from PMO users. It is anticipated that project fees over time will transition out of this bucket into Meeting Management. |
| Groups.io (custom domain) | $100 | n/a | This is the fee typically paid by an umbrella project (or standalone project not associated under an umbrella) to have a dedicated, branded Groups.io environment for their project (and child projects). |
| Groups.io (formation) | $10 | n/a | Projects in the Formation state that have not picked a name and/or domain, but need mailing list services, e.g. for a formation marketing group, can share the groups.linuxfoundation.org service, with PCC support for managing their list. This fee helps track the (typically unrecovered during formation state) cost of running groups.linuxfoundation.org. After projects launch, they can remove this fee by either deleting their formation lists if the content is no longer needed (or is confidential from the launched project), or by migrating their formation lists to their dedicated project service. |
| Groups.io (shared) | $0 | n/a | No cost, but helps show the utilization of a parent Groups.io service by child projects. This affiliation, similar to GitHub repo-level child-project affiliation, can allow delegating access to child project admins in PCC, including the ability to create new mailing lists for their child project. |
| Pantheon multisite | $35 | n/a | Covers the cost of the pool of multisite licenses (lfprojects-1, 2, etc) used to host projects in a "Wordpress Site Network" which do not have a dedicated Pantheon codebase/license. Due to domain quotas on the multisite, projects are expected to only point a single domain to Pantheon and use the PCC URL redirection capability to set up redirects for alias domains or subdomains (including redirection to/from "www" subdomain for the primary domain). Otherwise projects may see multiple charges for the same "site". |
| Pantheon standalone site | see table | n/a | Covers the cost of standalone-license fees used to host projects with a dedicated Pantheon codebase. Basic: $35 |
| Confluence Hosting | $250 | n/a | This covers approximately 1 hour a month (on average) to patch application CVEs (SysOp team), monitor site and add-on license expiry & re-up licenses (Project Support), on-call monitoring and follow-up (SysOps + IT Engineering). Also factors in an over-time recapture of initial setup & configuration work. Actual hosting fees are not included here (pass-thru). |
| Jira Hosting | $250 | n/a | See Confluence. |
| Gerrit Hosting | $250 | n/a | Similar to Confluence & Jira, except no ongoing work to maintain licenses, but substantially more effort on initial setup, recovered over time. Actual hosting fees are not included here (pass-thru). |
| Custom CI & Distribution | $650 | n/a | Deployments of Jenkins, Nexus, Sonar, or other similar tooling. This covers the substantial work to set up new systems as well as ongoing patching software and the underlying OS, 24x7 monitoring, & break-fix. Does not include support of the application, custom build environments (packer), troubleshooting of failing CI jobs — that's provided by IT Engineering Service fees. Actual hosting fees are not included here (pass-thru). |
| Cloud Account Management | $5 (step function) | 5% of all reconciled cloud fees | Costs to recover onboarding, running, reporting and general maintenance of cloud vendor costs and tools related to cloud governance. Actual Hosting Costs (e.g. AWS) are "pass-thru" costs invoiced directly to the project. |
Engineering support services cost guidelines remain the same as 2023 and are as follows:
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General Guidelines if required to share outside of the LF (e.g. formation team)
