I'll be that guy; I'm a little confused as to why this would require $200,000 (the requested total funding requested) to solve. From the site itself :<p>614,680,691 requests per month come down to ~230 request per second. Allowing for some spikiness that boils down to perhaps 1k request/second at peak. Requests in these cases are mostly relatively simple queries on version-ed, highly cacheable data. I say highly cacheable because it is relatively static data for which most (if not all) of the data fields relevant for these requests can fit in memory of perhaps even a single node (NPM currently includes 48,799 packages. That leaves a very healthy chunk of data per package on 16Gb-128Gb RAM server boxes).<p>The downloads are a bit of a puzzle to me as well. On my machine the average NPM package is about 200Kb (YMMV). 114,626,717 downloads are mentioned on the site. 200k times 114 million downloads lands us on roughly 23 TB. Even on a relatively expensive CDN such as Amazon CloudFront the total monthly cost for that bandwidth and content request load for CloudFront and the required S3 costs land on about $3k/month and that's ignoring all bulk discounts, reserved capacity and so on (which are very significant at these volumes).<p>I'm more than likely oversimplifying a few things here and there (or failed horribly at math) but I'd still be very interested to hear why this requires such a large investment. Also, wouldn't the more obvious solution be to open source the npmjs software and allow the community to contribute knowledge and time instead?<p>EDIT: Quickly wanted to point out that I use npmjs.org often , is a great service and that donations are very well deserved. After re-reading my post it turned out more negative sounding than intended.