Matt Davies Responds to Criticism of projectFLY Funding

Matt Davies of Mettar Simulations has posted a long message to Facebook, responding to criticism from users and FSElite over the funding of projectFLY.

He opened the post by stating the negativity of Wednesday's plea for funding was initiated primarily by FSElite, and berated them over what he and others believe was a biased opinion article.

"There is a huge misconception that I am sort of money grabbing, scamming, worthless piece of shit," said Davies on the Facebook post. "Although the latter part of those accusations may be correct, the first few definitely are not. I want to lay things out for you to understand and then maybe you’ll cease fire on thinking so negatively about projectFLY & maybe even me."

Davies expressed his incomprehension about critical people following him on social media, and then began to talk numbers.

"Within the last 6 months, projectFLY has tried to raise funds on 3 different occasions. We, in total, managed to raise £4000 (thank you!). If we take that trend and assume we can do the same over the next 6 months, that takes us to the £8000/year mark.

"That may seem a huge amount of money, and for most people it absolutely is, but when you’re serving a user base of 60,000+, £8000 makes only a dent in the overall running costs of things.

"projectFLY gets around 11 million web requests every 24hrs. I am, at this point, fairly sure it’s one of, if not the highest “hit” website in terms of web requests that exists within the industry.

"At any given point, there are approximately 5000 - 6000 people on the radar just “looking at it”. Our analytics don’t really give us much information beyond that - we just know that they’re there.

"Our CDN, which stores all of the fleet images, is now over 2.5TB."

Armed with the aforementioned statistics, Davies highlighted the fact that projectFLY needs "huge resources to keep it going at peak times", and that a powerful machine is required in order for it to function without issue.

"Combined, our running costs at the moment stands at approximately £2000/month (although last month it was up to £2500, but sometimes it's lower). It’s very high & we are aware of this. We are working to bring these costs down as a priority and we’re positive we can do this over time. It’s not going to happen overnight due to the way the current infrastructure is.

"That means per year, it costs £24000 to keep projectFLY running. That is just infrastructure."

Factoring in donations, Davies claims it therefore comes to £16,000 to run the service per year and expressed his dismay at no longer being able to financially support the service through his own pocket.

Davies continued: "A great example: AVSIM has an infrastructure donation goal of $25000/year. They require significantly less resources than we do, yet nobody complains about it - in fact, they support it fully. So why is it that I come under fire when I try to crowdfund the finances to keep projectFLY going?

"On a personal note, I do not pretend to be some incredible businessman with a background of success. You have to remember that I started projectFLY as a bit of fun with no intention of it getting anywhere close to where it is today. All I can do is spend my time learning and taking advice from people who are experts. Slowly, I’m getting there and my vision for how the future takes shape is definitely promising."

The subject of harassment was then brought up, as he states he is being attacked by the same people on a daily basis with fake profiles.

"[...] calling me out for doing “normal” things like grocery shopping is absolutely absurd. People are genuinely saying I am using funds from crowdfunding to pay for groceries and other day to day things make me mad, but what infuriates me even more is that their argument is that I just shouldn’t do them… so, I shouldn’t buy food, I shouldn’t have running water or have electricity. It’s absolutely insane. Who are these people and what planet do they live on!?

"I am not taking any money out of the “pot”, because there isn’t any money to take. I am putting a hell of a lot of money into the pot as I’ve demonstrated above."

The post was closed out with a personal thank you to supporters, and an appeal for people to leave him alone.

Wednesday's plea for funding projectFLY through donations, a Patreon campaign, and subscriptions, is available to read here.


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