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SCP-2391 Safe ~ medium confidence
SCP-2391
Expected annual
$1.2M
One-time setup
$1.1M
Annual recurring
$1.1M
Personnel
4
Initial one-time setup is roughly $1.08M driven primarily by property acquisition and technical/human-intel onboarding; steady-state annual costs are about $1.09M/year driven by staff wages, legal/disinformation retainers, and ongoing monitoring/forensics.
🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $1.1M
Property Purchase $500K
[#17] Optional property acquisition to secure real-world location (purchase estimate; renovations not itemized).
Disinformation Emergency Fund $150K
[#15] Emergency amplification/paid influencers/rapid counter-messaging budget for major public leaks.
Incident Response Per Major $100K
[#14] Per-serious-leak incident rapid-response and takedown operations budget (representative reserve).
Software Development Pipeline $85K
[#1] Development, QA, and automation scripts for capture/ingestion/notarization and deletion workflows.
Forensics Initial Engagement $50K
[#6] Initial tooling purchase/licenses and first-engagement contract(s) for digital forensics/OSINT contractors.
Legal Incident Fees $50K
[#7] Representative one-time per-incident legal/subpoena fees (major subpoena/cooperation negotiation).
Estate Settlement $50K
[#16] Representative one-time settlement/hush payment to family/estate if required.
Comment Logging Dev $35K
[#10] One-time development for comment logging/normalization system and initial ML/NLP integration.
Equipment $30K
[#2] Encrypted on-site storage hardware (air-gapped primary + hot spare, RAID, HSM/key manager, secure workstation).
Security Clearances $20K
[#20] Initial background checks/clearances for ~10 staff (polygraphs/monitoring where required).
Offsite Backup Setup $12K
[#3] Setup of off-site encrypted backups (LTO drives/tapes or cloud archival initial configuration).
Facilities $0
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Initial Research And Lab Setup $0
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🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $1.1M/yr
Staff Wages $385K/yr
[#8, #9, #18] Salaries + benefits for monitoring/operations analysts, IT security/sysadmin support, and outreach/DMCA takedown personnel (combined).
Cover Story And Legal $245K/yr
[#7, #15] Legal retainer to coordinate with platforms and international subpoenas plus disinformation/cover-story maintenance budget (retainer + ongoing operations).
Research And Monitoring $204K/yr
[#6, #10, #11, #13, #19, #22] Ongoing digital forensics/investigations, compute/licenses for comment analysis, experimental research budget, chain-of-custody/timestamping audits, OSINT subscriptions, and periodic compliance reviews.
Contingency Fund $182K/yr
[#23] Recommended 20% reserve of annual operating budget for unforeseen rapid escalation, international legal work, or emergency purchases.
Office Overhead $40K/yr
[#21] Rent, utilities, insurance, travel for legal meetings, and standard admin overhead apportioned to the program.
Facilities Maintenance $18K/yr
[#4] Colocation/hosting fees for redundancy and uptime (third-party secure data center).
Psychological Support $10K/yr
[#12] Counseling, EAP, memetic-awareness training and periodic debriefings for exposed staff.
Logistics And Transport $9K/yr
[#3, #5] Off-site backup storage rotation/cloud archival costs and bandwidth/API usage costs for downloads and metadata scraping.
Supplies And Consumables $0/yr
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⚡ Cost Scenarios
📊 Baseline (baseline) $1.1M/yr
82.0% probability / year
Normal year with steady automated capture, routine monitoring, legal retainer and disinformation maintenance; no major public leaks or property operations.
no_public_leak standard_weekly_uploads routine investigations
🚨 Minor Incident $1.3M/yr
15.0% probability / year +$200K vs baseline
Small-scale leak or trace leads to targeted takedown operations, a handful of subpoenas, and short-term forensic surge.
localized leak targeted takedown limited subpoenas
🚨 Major Breach $2.6M/yr
3.0% probability / year +$1.5M vs baseline
Widely publicized leak or viral spread requiring large-scale incident response, heavy legal/subpoena activity, broad disinformation amplification and intensive forensics; may trigger estate negotiations.
viral_public_exposure international_legal_actions large_scale_disinformation_campaign
👥 Personnel 4 total
Role Count Notes
Monitoring & Operations (Digital Archivist/Analyst) 2 [#8] Two analysts responsible for verifying captures, logging comments before deletion, chain-of-custody management and weekly verification (combined salaries included in staff_wages).
IT Security / Sysadmin 1 [#9] Part/full-time sysadmin/security engineer for patching, IDS, secure configuration and incident response support (personnel cost included in staff_wages).
Outreach / DMCA Takedown Personnel 1 [#18] One takedown/content investigator or contractor handling mirror searches and DMCA/liaison actions (cost included in staff_wages).
📋 Confidence Notes
Line-item ranges were provided in analyst notes allowing mid-range estimates, but many major costs are event-driven and optional (property purchase, estate settlements, per-incident legal fees) which reduces precision.
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