SCP-5426 — SCP-5426 | Cost Breakdown

Read on SCP Wiki ↗

SCP-5426 Neutralized ~ medium confidence

SCP-5426

Expected annual

$603K

One-time setup

$471K

Annual recurring

$563K

Personnel

First-year program costs are dominated by one-time crawler and lab setup plus recurring staff, hosting, and legal/PR retainer; expected first-year spend ~ $1.03M with steady-state annual costs driven by staffing, hosting, and legal/monitoring (~$563k/yr).

🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $471K

Equipment $201K

[#1, #3, #15] Web-crawler development (software/hardware integration), secure archival hardware, and backup/disaster-recovery initial setup.

Initial Research And Lab Setup $200K

[#7] Secure pharmacy / amnestic drug production lab setup and specialized acquisition for anomalous pharmaceuticals.

Facilities $50K

[#3, #19] Vault/secure-space setup and physical closeout/decommissioning costs (vault build/fit-out and neutralization wind-down).

Legal Initial Ops $10K

[#5] Immediate takedown/incident ops budget (one-time payments, urgent legal actions) to respond to initial resurgence.

Training And Sop Development $10K

[#12] Initial development of containment SOPs and training for crawler operators, field teams, and legal staff.

🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $563K/yr

Staff Wages $270K/yr

[#4, #9] Digital forensics/sysadmin/digital-analyst team and OSINT/social-media investigator salaries (2 digital analysts + 1 OSINT analyst assumed).

Cover Story And Legal $65K/yr

[#5, #16, #17] Ongoing legal/PR retainer, long-term cover-story/relationship maintenance, records/indemnity/NDA administration.

Logistics And Transport $50K/yr

[#6] Field containment team travel, deployments, and per-operation logistics budget for subject retrieval and amnestic administration.

Crisis Incident Response Fund $50K/yr

[#10] Emergency travel, overtime, contractors and urgent covert ops reserve to respond to sudden resurgences.

Facilities Maintenance $40K/yr

[#11] Rent/maintenance, physical security, alarm/surveillance for archive and analyst workspace.

Research And Monitoring $37K/yr

[#13, #14, #15] Annual audits/monitoring, red-team / mimicry-detection research, and routine backup/restore testing costs.

Psych Medical Followup $20K/yr

[#8] Medical observation, counseling, and cover-care expenses for amnesticized subjects.

Web Crawler Hosting $12K/yr

[#2] Hosting, bandwidth, and compute for continuous 24/7 crawler operation and inference (CDN/bandwidth costs).

Amnestic Stockpile Replenishment $10K/yr

[#7] Ongoing stockpile replenishment and per-dose costs for amnestic pharmaceuticals.

Training And Sop Refreshers $5K/yr

[#12] Annual refresher training and SOP updates as platforms evolve.

Energy And Utilities $2K/yr

[#18] Power and HVAC costs for servers, secure storage, and vault environment control.

Secure Archival Maintenance $1K/yr

[#3] Periodic medium replacement, hardware maintenance, and vault upkeep for archived copies.

Supplies And Consumables $0/yr

[]

Large Scale Reemergence Contingency $0/yr

[#20] Reserve for mass reemergence responses (0 baseline; funds allocated only if event demands).

⚡ Cost Scenarios

📊 Baseline (baseline) $563K/yr

88.0% probability / year

Normal year with steady monitoring and routine follow-up operations; no major incidents.

no resurgence routine takedowns standard follow-up

🚨 Minor Incident $663K/yr

10.0% probability / year +$100K vs baseline

Localized resurgence requiring emergency takedowns, extra legal actions, and several field retrievals.

targeted reposting small-scale memetic spread heightened platform resistance to takedowns

🚨 Large Scale Reemergence $2.1M/yr

2.0% probability / year +$1.5M vs baseline

Widespread reappearance or mutation requiring mass amnestic campaigns, major legal/PR operations, and large-scale takedowns.

mass reposting memetic mutation public exposure

👥 Personnel 3 total

Role	Count	Notes
Research Scientist / Digital Analyst	2	[#4] Digital forensics/sysadmin staff to maintain crawler, validate hits, and process archived material.
OSINT Analyst / Investigator	1	[#9] Social-media investigators and subject-tracing personnel to locate affected posters and re-posters.

📋 Confidence Notes

Estimates drawn directly from analyst ranges and the SCP text; line-item ranges are wide (hosting, legal, and amnestic production vary greatly) and event probabilities are judgment-based, so medium confidence is appropriate.

← SCP-5425 ↑ All SCPs SCP-5427 →