Hive Projects Budget Transparency Meeting

Project Budgets and Community Marketing of Their Achievements

This session brought together key Hive project teams Hive account@ecency, Hive account@peakd, Hive account@blocktrades, Hive account@asgarth, Hive account@jarvie, Hive account@good-karma, and Hive account@starkerz to discuss budgets, development efficiency, and a shared vision for marketing the progress being built across the ecosystem.

Budget & Cost Overview

PeakD

PeakD operates as a legal entity which had a team of 3 developers plus community contributors. Hive account@jarvie and Hive account@asgarth lead development presently. The team has already implemented a 22% cost reduction recently. Development accounts for approximately 85% of total costs, with infrastructure and other expenses making up the remaining 15%. Infrastructure costs have seen a modest increase of around 10%, though they remain broadly stable. European-based software developers offer more competitive rates compared to their US counterparts.

Ecency

Ecency maintains a team of 3 developers, with one developer and Hive account@good-karma, working on the mobile app, and one developer plus GK on the web application. All development is open source. Mobile development rates tend to be higher than web. The team is geographically distributed, ensuring near-continuous coverage.

Ecency's recent cost cut was 25% and after this, since the developers too such big rate cuts, the projects breakdown is 65% going to developers,

Both projects are committed to full transparency. A public spreadsheet detailing costs will be made available — see here for detailed Ececny budget: https://discord.com/channels/@me/790325868072796190/1481547966262022224

AI-Driven Development Productivity

A significant portion of the discussion focused on how AI tooling has transformed development workflows. Teams reported substantial productivity gains: PeakD estimated a 5–10x improvement in code writing speed, while Ecency reported gains exceeding 10x. AI has proven particularly valuable in planning and code generation phases.

At PeakD, Jarvie has begun "vibe coding" with AI assistance, dramatically increasing his personal output — estimated at more than 10x. For Sergio, the improvement sits in the 5–10x range. AI is increasingly becoming the primary method of development.

CI testing pipelines have also benefited. Ecency's website CI testing completes in approximately 10 minutes, and PeakD noted that AI has significantly improved their CI lead times. However, manual testing — particularly for Android device compatibility — remains the primary bottleneck. The group explored whether AI-driven test generation and device emulators could help address this challenge.

Ecency has also developed an SDK (published as an NPM package) to unify the data layer ahead of testing, which has accelerated the website's test cycle. There is potential for collaboration for other projects to work on and beenfit from these tesing capabilities.

Community Marketing Initiative

A central theme of the discussion was the essential need to better market what Hive's projects are building. The general plan is to make DHF funded and other Hive project git hub repositories more open and AI-accessible, enabling automated summarisation of development progress and the automated generation of social media content. This would allow the community to collectively amplify the value being delivered through its funding.

The meeting was partly a call to actrion for community members to get involved in this initaitve so that more can be made of the progress that projects are making with the funding being distributed.

It is critically important that Hive markets its achievements in order to more than justify community spending.

Historically, Hive has not excelled at this. By combining AI-assisted content generation with a coordinated, community-wide marketing effort, projects and their progress can gain far greater exposure — and it is easier today than ever before.

The hope is that the entire community can unite behind this joint initiative to make as much noise as possible and telegraph the progress of Hive's community-funded projects to the wider world. A real community push to use resources to focus on marketing was agreed as being essential moving forward to justify the spending from the DHF.

Retention & Onboarding

The group also discussed retention and a community-backed onboarding funnel. The proposed concept involves multiple, mostly existing onboarding routes that guide new users through structured tasks designed to teach them about Hive, culminating in blog posts — enabling newcomers to post and earn as they learn.

A dedicated "newbie" account would follow all new users entering through this funnel, creating a curated feed of newcomer content. The hope is that community whales would rally behind this initiative, easily discovering and supporting new users through this feed.

Looking Ahead

The session concluded with an extended discussion about what participants most want to see built on Hive — a conversation that underscored the energy and ambition driving the ecosystem forward.

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