Sorry if I sound too picky, but to me, $1,000/month for server costs seems excessive — especially considering the actual workload.
For comparison: one of the top-tier hosting providers offers insanely powerful machines for $1,000/month — enough to run multiple Solana or Hyperliquid nodes simultaneously.
For the tasks described here, such infrastructure is clearly overkill.
Could you please share the server specifications? What exactly justifies this level of hardware?
Also, I genuinely don’t understand why two separate servers are needed (especially when hosting implies 24/7 availability) — and third for for AI. Why not consolidate into a single, high-performance machine?
And regarding the $4,000 USD per month, for 2 years:
1 day of Design
1 day of Development
1 day of Testing per month
That’s 24 max hours total per month, which breaks down to $166/hour and more/
Isn’t that a bit steep for such a limited scope of work?
You can see the live monitoring of all these 3 servers on our public status.proposals.app page.
As you can see, the biggest cost is in sib-03, the AI server, that we will use to summarize proposals and comment discussions and offer that in the email notifications, and in proposals.app of course.
For example, in OVH Cloud, the provider you used as an example, their cheapest AI server, which is roughly 50% better than ours, costs $2,336.22 USD with a 24 month commitment. Which is way more than $500 USD a month
We have 3 servers for redundancy and resilience but also because it forces us to run in a decentralized and more scalable setup. By running a cluster of machines, we can easily scale our setup to handle more user traffic and data indexing.
And regarding the $4,000 USD per month for maintenance, yes, it averages out to $166.67 USD per hour. To be more specific, it’s $500 USD a month for that cost with $175 USD per hour for Design and Developmentm and $150 USD per hour for Testing and QA, as can be seen in our detailed breakdown spreadsheet linked in the proposal above.
First of all, Paulo is a trusted member of the Arbitrum DAO community, so this proposal already has a positive feel to me :). Thanks @paulofonseca and the team for continuing to invest in improving governance infra!
I like the three features mentioned, they’re practical and thoughtful and definitely have a yes from me:
Voting Power Tags help readers see who the big delegates are in discussions, and adds clarity and accountability.
Live Votes make it easier to follow and vote directly from the forum, super helpful for busy delegates and newcomers.
Email notifications are a great way to keep community members in the loop, especially those not active on the forum.
That said, I do have one concern. After seeing what happened with the Senate tool in Aave DAO passed in Sept 2023, stopped by Dec. I worry about what happens if things don’t go as planned here.
The payment is done in 3 months, but the work is supposed to last 2 years. I think we should add backup plan in case the team can’t continue midway. While I trust the team’s intent, the DAO must safeguard itself.
Hey @Ignas thank you for reading, for the kind words, and the feedback!
You do bring a very valid point about the continuation of service with this proposal and what happened with our previous VC-backed startup, Senate.
For context, Senate mostly started at the end of 2022, with three co-founders, @andreiv, me, and another co-founder.
We launched the first version of the product in March 2023, and then after that launch and a good reception of that product, we started to raise a seed round that we closed in August 2023 (apparently the worst month to raise money in crypto in the previous 8 years =) of around $800K USD total. We had an impressive roster of angels and investors, one that I’m very proud of, and that is highly respected in the DAO community.
Shortly after, we realized that we couldn’t figure out a way to come up with a business model, in the DAO governance space, that would bring a sizable return to our investors, and amid some other co-founder misalignment issues, we decided to shut down the company and return the remaining of the funds to our investors (after all was said and done, the investors got most of their money back).
Additionally, and most importantly, we returned the small symbolic payment we received from Aave for the email notification forum integration, immediately after we decided to shut down the company, as can be seen here.
So, needless to say, when Andrei and I decided to double down and build something similar with proposals.app, we took a very different approach to it. =)
So nowadays… proposals.app is fully open-source and can be self-hosted by anyone. Just like we do right now. If we literally die, and the servers go down, it should take a not-so-technically-minded person aided by a coding LLM, and some beefy servers, just a couple of hours, to spin up a full instance of proposals.app back-end, front-end, and forum integrations, and restore the level of service and functionality promised in this proposal.
Members of the Entropy Advisors team have provided brief feedback to Paulo as he built out proposals.app as a grant recipient, and appreciate the time, effort, and passion that has gone into the project.
With that being said, this proposal doesn’t represent a prudent use of resources when weighed against its expected impact on the DAO. We admit that Entropy may be biased in this response considering the fact that we are a large delegate and a very high-context company when it comes to the Arbitrum DAO. Our team already checks the forum every day, knows the voting power of relevant commentators, and feels as though the social contract for posting proposals on Thursdays has made the timing of offchain and onchain votes highly predictable. As such, we do not see $206,400 worth of value coming from this proposal’s implementation.
The proposed feature additions to the forum are “nice-to-have” marginal updates. As mentioned by previous comments, Discourse already has a built-in email notification feature, and, as first mentioned by @tane, Entropy has an in-house tool that sends Telegram notifications for forum posts that only costs $20/month. Similarly, it is not overly cumbersome to check Tally/Snapshot for live votes either, thus making the live tracking on the forum a minimal improvement. In terms of the voting power tags, it would be a nice-to-have novelty, but, again, there is already a plethora of sources to identify delegates’ voting power (e.g., we regularly leverage Dune for deeper analysis of active proposals and the delegate base).
Speaking more broadly, we believe it’s important for the DAO to evaluate tools and proposals like this in the context of existing initiatives. We pay delegates a significant amount of money every month through DIP for delegates to remain informed and active within the DAO.
While we appreciate all the work that Paulo has put into proposals.app, we do not view this proposal as offering sufficient value to justify the $206,400 cost. We do not see this as a tool that our team would rely on or that would be a significant quality-of-life improvement for dedicated delegates. As such, this wouldn’t be a prudent resource allocation opportunity in our view, even at a fraction of the budget.
Based on my usage of the current tools (forum, Snapshot, Tally), here’s my perspective:
Given my experience with the forum, I don’t believe an additional platform is necessary at this stage. If we were facing censorship or frequent downtime on the current platform, I’d feel differently, but that does not seem to be the case.
Regarding the proposed features, my thoughts are:
Voting power tags: Useful. Filtering voices based on voting power would help highlight key contributors and reduce noise from less relevant comments.
Live voting: Not needed. I prefer to form my own opinion by reading all comments before heading to Snapshot to vote.
Email notifications: would not use. Snapshot already has similar functionality, and I wouldn’t want notifications for every forum post.
Personally, I’d like to see features that address overly long or verbose responses, such as a way to summarize or collapse them. It would also be valuable to highlight the most upvoted comments, ideally weighted by voting power, to surface the most influential and relevant feedback.
Hey @Entropy thank you for reading and for your feedback!
I agree we should evaluate proposals like this in the broader scope and context of the DAO.
Regarding this proposal being a prudent spending of DAO resources or not, I would point out that the DAO is currently spending approximately $200k USD per month on delegate incentives, on average. The DAO is also paying Entropy Advisors $200k USD per month for their services.
We believe a fairer framing through which delegates should evaluate this proposal is not one where they argue from their own particular bias and point of view, but a more holistic one that prioritizes the quality of life improvements for all delegates and users of this forum.
A framing like this one that David described previously in this thread:
I therefore urge delegates to evaluate this proposal based on its perceived impact over the next two years, during which we will enhance this set of features and deliver ongoing quality of life and user experience improvements for delegates in Arbitrum DAO.
We support this proposal, and believe each of the 3 integrations are necessary. However, the extent to which they are necessary varies. For instance, email reminders are a convenient way to encourage DAO participation, while voting power tags are necessary for continued DAO functionality.
If we can sequence integration, beginning with voting power tags as a minimally viable implementation, it may reduce costs or at least focus initial development on the most impactful feature. We understand that much of the cost arises from back-end indexing, so front-end trade-offs may not significantly affect the budget. Still, a phased approach could be worth exploring.
Regarding voting power tags, this is absolutely necessary. There needs to be a mechanism for sorting through AI-generated slop, and while imperfect, filtering for voting power is a start. This is also a launchpad for a vital conversation on what we want forum discussions to be in the age of AI –– what is the extent of AI involvement that should be tolerated? At the risk of becoming too speculative, will voting power tags be a segway to on-chain verification of forum contributors? There is no clear answer, but definitely something to think about as we consider how to improve the governance forum.
Also, the idea that voting power tags will rig the forum in favor of larger delegates has merit, but neglects to mention the fact that larger delegates are typically greater contributors to the forum in the first place. As mentioned, forum contributions do carry more weight if they are backed by greater voting power. By no means does this mean we should disregard those with little voting power, and we trust the DAO will not disregard posts simply due to that fact.
Overall, we love the idea of improving the governance forum. Thanks to all those involved in making this forum as streamlined and efficient as possible.
Michigan Blockchain | Jack Verrill | TG @JackVerrill
Hey @maxlomu thank you for reading and for your feedback!
Just to clarify that our email notifications are not about every single forum post, but only when a new proposal is posted on this forum, aka. a new topic is posted on the proposals category of this forum, and every time there is a new offchain or onchain vote starting and 24 hours before they end.
This is a cool suggestion, thank you! I will take note of it for future proposals.app functionality.
We agree that there should be more focus on supporting governance tooling. Disjointed governance is a pain point for a multitude of DAOs and is a significant barrier to entry for newcomers. Having said that, we’d recommend putting a pause on this proposal for now, for the following reasons:
Wider strategic proposal needed.
Several governance tooling platforms are lobbying for funding in the DAO and directly to AF.
We should not be funding initiatives based on service asks, but instead we should treat governance like a product. Get user feedback, put together product requirements, and fund to alleviate those issues.
Internally at the AF, we are starting that process, and it should be an iterative process to continually improve the governance experience.
Proposed cost structure.
$120k is paid immediately without the delivery of any milestones; maintenance & hosting should only be paid after delivery of milestones. It should also be paid over time and not all at once to ensure it is maintained to satisfactory standards.
$86k is very expensive for the forum features offered; it also isn’t clear if it is actually technically feasible since our discourse space is not self-hosted.
Overall, $206k is significantly expensive for what is offered which is delivery of 3 features, 3 days per month maintenance, and hosting costs.
Technical implementation restrictions.
The current forum is hosted by Discourse, which means the ability to customize the forum, including adding novel features, is limited. This could be alleviated by moving to a self-hosted Discourse instance, but this would take some time. A question to the proposals.app team (@paulofonseca@andreiv) is whether a theme component-based approach, instead of plugin-based, is confirmed to be achievable now, and would it be compatible out-of-the-box with future themes and theme components, such as a visual forum redesign?
This proposal might be a good opportunity for the DAO, including the AF, to start thinking about how to improve governance UX as part of a wider strategy. Accordingly, we believe this conversation should be moved to the ‘Technical Discussion’ category. It is important that, we avoid vendor lock-in via the governance process, and believe OpCo might be in a good position to help navigate the evolution of governance.
Thanks @paulofonseca for this proposal and for leading this initiative. Over the past few weeks we’ve seen a lot of discussions / proposals around DAO tooling for enabling efficient delegate participation via forums and other comms channels and we welcome all efforts geared at solving this challenge.
Even for a two-year period, on a surface level, it’s hard to justify why this would require a budget of $200k. Could you provide at least high-level details on what it will take to build and maintain these forum integrations, so we can both assess and get a clearer sense of how much capacity is required to pull this off?
In line with the previous point on costs, I believe this feature (email notifications) has already been implemented on the app (I signed up and subscribed to the feature), meaning the functionality has already been built and is already accessible anyways? In my understanding, the only thing to be done here is allowing users to access the (already existing) feature via the forum rather than building a new feature from scratch? Please let me know if my understanding is correct.
Otherwise, I believe the email notifications feature is perhaps the most important one here. From a delegate standpoint, this would be very helpful. Discourse has a native feature that allows you to track *existing discussions/threads, but being able to be notified about newly created discussions will be incredibly helpful.
In my view, features centred around forum notifications are the most valuable for delegates. There is a lot to keep track of in terms of updates, discussions, etc. For instance (and perhaps as a suggestion), enabling highly customizable notifications is something we would 100% get behind. We don’t just want to be notified of all posts, which, in itself, is not very different from manually checking the “New” tab on the forum every now and then. We want to be able to filter for specific posts, authors, forum tags, or even specific keywords. This will massively improve the experience for us as delegates and truly help us stay in the weeds of what’s being discussed at every point in time.
We appreciate the intention behind this proposal to streamline and enhance the Arbitrum governance process. Improving how delegates and community members interact with proposals and voting mechanisms is a worthwhile goal.
We see clear value in the proposed features, particularly:
Voting Power Tags: These can be helpful for newcomers and the broader Arbitrum community who may not be familiar with each delegate. Displaying voting power provides useful context to discussions and helps readers better understand where influence lies in the conversation.
Live Votes Widget: This is a highly practical addition. At present, delegates must monitor multiple platforms to stay updated on proposal statuses. A centralized, real-time voting indicator would significantly reduce friction and encourage more active and timely participation—especially important given recent quorum-related concerns.
Proposal Notification Emails: While notifications for new proposal postings may be less impactful, we believe vote opening and closing alerts are genuinely useful. In fact, we’ve developed a lightweight internal tool that pushes such alerts to our team’s Slack. Making this functionality available to the entire ecosystem would be a net positive.
Overall, we are supportive of this proposal. Our one concern is around the cost structure. The development costs for the three features appear reasonable. However, the maintenance and hosting budget, at $120,000 over two years, seems disproportionately high and could benefit from more detail or a cost-efficiency review.
For clarification, the average Delegate Incentives for the last three months was $110K.
Also, we don’t expect this number to go up, but quite the contrary.
Finally, I don’t personally understand the comparison between a program that incentivizes +/- 25 contributors and a DAO tool, and while it can help create an argument for justifying funding, it seems like a nonsensical comparison.
Thinking of the DAO as a source of inspiration for experimentation is one of the things I’m most interested in. With programmable money and now programmable, and even “gameable” voting, I believe our focus should be on making everything more programmatic, since that immediately enables scalability. That may sound blunt, but if humanity’s path is toward agentic governance and AI-powered societies, why are we still prioritizing purely visual features? I support the spirit of this proposal, but I’d suggest pivoting toward data: the forum needs to provide an SDK of data-driven analytics tools, and given the growing interest in agentic governance, also tools that let governance agents ingest data natively for this purpose. A few examples:
Unified data endpoint for governance analysis
If I want to build a governance-analysis bot or dashboard, I’d love a single API endpoint to pull everything I need, usable by both devs/LLM chains and compliance officers or legal teams alike.
Programmatic vote-buying & game-theoretic tooling
As vote-buying and “gameified” governance become more prevalent, how about providing programmatic feeds or SDKs so future governance agents can subscribe to, analyze, and even simulate vote flows?
Data-driven narrative builder
In my view, autonomous governance is a human-first journey, but we share that landscape with many different power structures. It would be incredible to have a tool that can stitch together a data-driven story of governance evolution, helping us understand how different forces interact over time.
In conclusion, prioritizing data-driven tools over mere visual enhancements will better position the forum for a governance future grounded in data and deep analysis. I’d love to see more emphasis on this aspect in the proposal so that I can support it more openly.
AranaDigital supports this proposals.app integration bundle because the new Live-Vote banner will pin real-time quorum and deadline data to every proposal thread, guiding delegates straight from discussion to Snapshot or on-chain ballots and sharply reducing missed quorums; the Voting-Power tags give instant context on each commenter’s ARB weight, enabling readers to distinguish substantive delegate contributions from less-relevant commentary; opt-in proposal-notification emails pull busy or new delegates back whenever a thread opens, a vote launches, or 24 hours remain, trimming late votes; every feature ships as a self-hostable, open-source Discourse component backed by an AGPL-licensed GitHub repo and a publicly monitored uptime dashboard, keeping our governance stack forkable and resilient, and the team has already demoed the stack at ETH Belgrade to positive delegate interest. The ask is $206 k over two years, including $120 k for maintenance and hosting, and while a detailed cost sheet is available, we argue that this looks higher than comparable builds and would be better tested under a shorter contract. Would the team would consider trimming the commitment to a one-year pilot that ships some features first before the DAO locks in the full spend?
I think this is a great potential contribution. Especially the plugin that shows the votes per forum poster. The $175 per hour charge is way too expensive as that equates to over a salary of $360k per year. Thats too expensive for the DAO.
Your proposals app however is very cool. I think if you applied for funding for that app it’d probably do much better than this proposal.
Hi @paulofonseca , thank you (and Andrei) for the detailed proposal. All three features are nice-to-have and would make the forum easier to navigate. Below are a few thoughts and questions from our side.
1 Voting-Power Tags
Several delegates have flagged a risk of bias here.
@maxlomu has raised a very good point about filtering out noise, however we still believe that displaying raw voting weight could unintentionally cause smaller delegates to be ignored, even when they share valuable ideas.
Rather than labeling voting power, we suggest using badges that reflect a person’s position or activity, such as “Active Delegate,” “DIP Participant,” or their formal DAO role (e.g., committee member or working group participant). This still provides readers with useful context and could reduce costs, as it eliminates the need for real-time voting power data.
2 Live-Vote Banner
We do think this is a nice-to-have feature, having real-time result within each thread. However, we have a few suggestions:
Will the banner automatically update to show the final result once voting closes? Currently, if we were to do this, it would required the forum admin to manually tag proposals as “Passed” or “Failed” in Discourse. If we could automate this process, that would help improve each proposal’s forum status clarity.
We’d also like to better understand the core problem this feature aims to solve. Is it primarily meant as a reminder for voters? If so, what kind of impact does it have and is that impact worth the cost, especially considering we can just look directly from Tally and Snapshot?
Don’t get us wrong, this feature is definitely useful. We’re just trying to understand its value and potential trade-offs.
3 Proposal-Notification E-mails
We already find Discourse’s built-in email and digest system quite useful, so the $28.8K price tag feels high for what seems like an incremental benefit.
If many delegates continue relying on native Discourse notifications, would the DAO still be expected to pay the full amount? At this stage, it is difficult to justify the cost, especially since there is no clear evidence that these features will see widespread adoption among delegates. Much of this functionality already exists within Discourse, and Tally also provide notification feature as well.
That said, this solution does offer some advantages. Centralized notifications for Snapshot and Tally are helpful, and features like community call reminders could be useful. These improvements would enhance the user experience. However, at $28.8K, the cost still feels high compared to the value it creates, especially if usage remains low.
Budget & Team Size
Pricing has been a key concern raised by other delegates as well as ourselves. Given the proposed budget of $206K USD over two years, we have a few questions we’d like to better understand first:
We did some preliminary research on market rates, particularly for Web3 project managers and designers. While we fully recognize that rates can vary based on expertise and scope and that our data might not be perfectly accurate, we came across an average rate of approximately $63/hour for Web3 project managers, with a high end around $96/hour. In comparison, the proposed rate appears to be about 1.56x higher than the maximum we found.
We’d like to learn more about the reasoning behind these rate differences, whether it’s due to the specific expertise required, the scope of responsibilities, or other considerations that might not be immediately apparent.
The same question applies to the designer role as well. If you could share a bit more context, that would be very helpful for us to understand the full picture.
Hey there, everybody! Thank you all for your feedback!
We have significantly updated the proposal, and now the cost is only ~29% of what was initially proposed — just a simple subscription-like fee of $60,000 USD for 1 year of maintenance and hosting for the three proposed feature integrations.
We decided to reduce the term of this proposal to just one year, as a few delegates recommended, and to charge only the maintenance and hosting fees, as this model aligns better with our open-source ethos and addresses the most common type of feedback we received regarding the initially proposed $206,400 USD total cost being too high.
proposals.app is, first and foremost, an open-source project. So it makes sense that we follow a traditional open-source business model where maintenance subscriptions are the primary source of funding for contributors. This way, we can ensure a consistent revenue stream to sustain the product’s development and make it available to as many people as possible.
We also gathered, from the diverse feedback we received, that all three feature integrations are seen as useful by the collective set of delegates. As we all know, here in Arbitrum DAO, we have delegates of all “shapes and sizes” who come with a diverse set of preferences for which of these features are the most useful. Since we had very specific feedback highlighting the usefulness of all three feature integrations, we decided to keep the same scope that was initially proposed, in this new version of the proposal. This also shows that this specific set of feature integrations we proposed is based on the user research efforts we’ve conducted with a diverse set of delegates, to guarantee a good product fit between what delegates need and what we can offer with proposals.app.
Additionally, we would like to highlight that, during the past week of discussion and deliberation in this forum, we’ve already made significant progress in building most of the proposed features, as evident from the commits on our open-source GitHub repository here.
You can also view the initial prototype of the Live Votes feature component, which will be integrated into the Discourse forum in the same way as the Voting Power Tags example above.
We will be putting this proposal up for an offchain vote on Snapshot today, using the basic vote type of For / Abstain / Against. If the offchain vote passes, we will then proceed to a non-constitutional onchain vote.
Really useful additions and at $5k a month is very cheap from an IT infra spend for this kind of complexity. This is a no-brainer.
Andrei and Paulo are master craftsmen with their work, Arbitrum would do well to back them, keep them in the Arbitrum tent iterating and further innovating govtech over the coming years.
For / 
Abstain / 
Against. If the offchain vote passes, we will then proceed to a non-constitutional onchain vote.