I'm seeing a bunch of posts today about how hosting a mastodon admin doesn't cost a lot of money, and first I want to say that this is true; you can run an instance on $10-20/mo entirely reasonably.
But I don't want anyone to forget that there is a labor cost in running and maintaining an instance. It's not just pushing a button and feeding in some money, it's also monitoring your server and keeping it secure and handling reports and doing upgrades and all fo that.