How much does it cost to run a Steem voting bot in Google's Cloud? Month 2 results

After two full months of experimentation in the Google cloud infrastructure, here are my observations from operating a no-bid voting bot in Google's cloud.

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Cost

As posted here, the cost of running a Steem voting bot last month, during the month of March, was $0.18.

Today, after the bot's second month running in Google's so-called "Always Free" tier, the cost for April is $0.16.

Both months' costs were entirely offset by credits from Google's 1 year promotional deal for new users.

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Here is a graph of billing information for the month of April. (click on image for a larger view)

ROI

In last month's post, I was uncertain if I would move any new accounts from a bot running in a VM on my own personal computer up to Google's cloud, but for the sake of consistency, I decided not to. So, as in March, the @remlaps2 account has been the only one that I have voting from the cloud. At present, the account has an effective Steem Power (holdings + delegations) of 242.17.

As a reminder, my primary purpose with this bot is to provide support for authors of attractive content. By doing this, I hope to play a small part in making the blockchain more useful, attractive, and valuable. Drawing curation rewards is a secondary goal, so ROI isn't really a very useful metric, but it's still fun to look at.

Additionally, I didn't make any substantial changes to the post selection algorithm, so I'm satisfied with it for now as a hobby project, but it remains somewhat naive.

Against that backdrop, here are approximate ROI numbers for April

Cost of Steem on March 31: $0.460733, Effective Steem Power on March 31: 240.93
Cost of Steem on April 30: 0.346462, Effective Steem Power on April 30: 242.17
Change in price: -$0.114271, Change in effective Steem Power - Curation Rewards: 0.803, Interest: 0.437

Value of curation rewards at 3/31 price: $0.37
Value of curation rewards at 4/30 price: $0.28

Percent change in price: -24.8%, Percent change in effective Steem Power: 0.515%
APR in price: -96.73%, APR in effective Steem Power: 6.36%

Dollar value on 3/31: $111.00
Dollar value on 4/30: $83.90
Change in dollar value: -$27.10
Percent change in dollar value: -24.4%
APR in dollar value: -96.51%

And here is the latest graph of curation rewards, in terms of Steem (courtesy of Google Sheets & steemdb, click on image for a larger view):

Discussion

So the bottom line is that the value of the Steem that the bot brought in during the month of April was $0.28 in the most conservative scenario, which is $0.12 more than the cost paid to Google, so in the strictest sense it remains profitable to run the bot in the cloud.

However, with a near 25% drop in the price of Steem during the course of the month, the increase in the amount of Steem was dwarfed by the change in account value.

About the bot's voting

In case you're curious, I am adding a section to this month's post with some information from @steemreports about how @remlaps2 has been voting. Here is the steemreports graph of the outgoing vote distributions (5% of this post's rewards will go to @steemreports):

The top-10 vote recipients are:
@burnpost
@remlaps-lite
@organduo
@curie
@guifaquetti
@bengy
@ronaldoavelino
@classical-radio
@future24
@jaybird

As you might guess, I only control one of those accounts. And the gini-simpson voting diversity is 0.977 on a scale from 0 to 1, with 1 being the most diverse:

Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

Steve is also a co-founder of the Steem's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.