[true_religion]

Well.... they couldn't afford Fast.ly, or Akamai, or Brightcove, but they could afford any tier-2 or tier-3 CDN.

For example CDN77, would start you off at 0.016/gb if you have more than 100TB per month, without any negotiation.

If you have 300TB per day, you surely can negotiate sub-cent pricing somewhere.

No, the costs are manageable.

I think the charitable/community projects setup for developers, need to act like non-profits in other sectors and actively seek out donations.

[takluyver]

I assume there's some difference in e.g. speed or reliability between Fastly (8 c/GB) and CDN77 (1.6 c/GB)? Even if you can negotiate it to 0.8 c/GB, you're still talking about a huge piece of the PSF's budget. They would have to either cut other expenditure (e.g. making grants) dramatically, or find a lot of new income (continuously, not just a one-off donation drive). And PyPI's bandwidth is growing rapidly [1].

If PyPI didn't have sponsor providing bandwidth, I'd guess it would implement some form of rate limiting and encourage people to mirror/cache packages much more to reduce load. I don't think it would die completely, but it would be less convenient and still cost the PSF a fair bit of money.

[1] https://twitter.com/di_codes/status/1235707819955032069