Subscan | Infrastructure Costs of Subscan for Kusama & Statemine Networks (from January to September 2023)

This is a follow up proposal to what we submitted before:

#229 Subscan | Infrastructure Costs of Subscan for Kusama & Statemine (from July to December 2022)

Subscan is an essential block explorer and analytics tool for the Substrate ecosystem, providing valuable insights to the Substrate community. However, the maintenance and operation of Subscan requires a significant investment of resources, including server infrastructure, security, and personnel costs. Therefore, we propose reimbursing the operation and maintenance fee for Subscan for the period January to September 2023 from the Kusama treasury to ensure its continuous operation and maintenance.

We highly value feedback from our community users, and over the past few months, we've made substantial efforts to reduce infrastructure costs. The results have been both effective and gratifying. Starting from July 2023, the operational expenses have gradually decreased and have recently stabilized. As an illustration, taking our GCP bill as an example, the costs for the past week have decreased by more than 50.52% compared to their historical peak.
For specific parameters and billing details, please refer to the "GCP Bill" section below.
For our specific development efforts, please refer to the "Operations and Maintenance Cost Reduction Plan" section below.

The growth of Subscan is intrinsically tied to the support of our community, which we deeply appreciate. We aspire to enhance community involvement in Subscan's decision-making processes. As a result, we propose a gradual shift in Subscan's development approach, starting from November 2023, towards a community-developer collaborative model. In this new framework, Subscan's development will be guided by the needs and feedback of the community. Features with the highest demand from the community will be prioritized for development, aligning more closely with the ecosystem's requirements. While we have implemented some of these principles in the past, we recognize that they have not been as open and transparent as desired. Our aim is to continually improve upon this aspect. And the specific plan will be officially announced in December!

Please view the detailed proposal here.