What this infrastructure costs

EigenSelect publishes its infrastructure economics in full. The figures below are live billing values, verified against provider invoices and APIs — not estimates. We publish them because a service whose product is documented evidence should be prepared to document itself.

The commitment chain is served by two authoritative nameservers we operate in separate jurisdictions, and one dedicated proof domain. This is the complete monthly cost of the apparatus your dig command talks to:

For calibration: €1.36 is the price of approximately 5.4 quantum executions, or roughly one fifth of an hour of parking in central Stockholm. The proof domain serves no website. It exists to answer TXT queries about wavefunction collapses, and it does so from two countries simultaneously.

One of our two nameservers has an IPv4 address. We would like it on record that this was not voluntary.

A public IPv4 address costs €3.65 per month — 8.5 times the price of the server it is attached to (€0.43), and the equivalent of 14.5 quantum executions on cryogenic hardware. Per month. For a 45-year-old address format. Our founding position was to allocate that budget to physics instead, on both nameservers, and the verification plane was built IPv6-only accordingly.

The .eu registry's delegation acceptance checks do not share this position. They refused the all-IPv6 nameserver set. They then refused a set in which one nameserver had acquired an IPv4 address. Delegation is the one function a proof domain cannot decline to perform, so both nameservers now carry IPv4 addresses, procured in stages during the negotiations and held under protest. The two addresses cost 8.5 times the nameservers they front, combined — the legacy address tax now exceeds the cost of every other component of the verification plane put together.

The honest consequence, revised: a resolver with no IPv6 path now reaches both nameservers directly. The limitation this section used to disclose has been purchased out of existence, involuntarily, at €7.30 a month. Dual-stack public resolvers (Google, Cloudflare, Quad9) were always fine, and the Nostr channel is independent of our DNS entirely. Our objection to the arrangement stands, here, at whatever length you have just read.

The direct quantum cost of a €50 selection is therefore 0.5–1.0% of its price. The remainder funds the report, the verification plane, the engineering, and the margin. We consider the ratio itself part of the product: you are not paying for electrons through a refrigerator. You are paying for the documentation that they went through it for you.

The application itself runs on shared infrastructure whose marginal cost to this service rounds to zero, and is therefore excluded. The commercial domain (eigenselect.com, to 2029) and the proof domain (eigenselect.eu, auto-renewing) are held at different registrars with no shared failure mode; registrar fees are stated above at their flat renewal rates, with no promotional first-year pricing. Figures on this page are updated when billing values change.