Skip to main content
Otranspo
Funding and independence

What this costs

What it costs to run this site.

This site asks riders for money, so it should say what the money is for. These are the actual amounts billed, read from the billing records themselves rather than estimated.

Measured September 8, 2026

What it costs to run this site.

ItemWhat it pays forPer month
ServerThe machine that holds every arrival ever recorded, answers the trip planner, and runs the live mapUS$50.99
Database storage120 GB for the arrival history that makes the reliability scores possibleUS$9.20
BackupsNightly copies, so a failed disk does not erase the recordUS$10.20
Web hostingServing the site itself: every page, every search, every map tile requestUS$178.30
Domain namesThe .ca and .com addresses, so the site is reachable whichever one a rider typesUS$1.64Billed once a year, at US$19.65
Total, per monthUS$250.33

Amounts are in US dollars, which is how these services are billed.

What this total does not include

  • The time spent building and running it. That is unpaid, and it is the largest real cost of the site by a wide margin.

A number that leaves something out should say so. Adding up only the parts that are easy to measure would understate what this takes.

These figures move

Hosting is the volatile line: it rises with how much the site is used and with how it is built, and it has risen sharply as more of the network history came online. It is a snapshot with a date on it, not a live meter, and it will be restated when it is measured again rather than quietly left to drift.

For comparison

The City of Ottawa has committed close to $700,000 since 2023 to the company behind the Transit app, on one sole-sourced contract that never went to a council vote.

Read what the disclosures show

If you want to help cover it

Contributions are voluntary and change nothing about what any rider can see or do here. Everything on this site stays free whether or not anyone gives anything.