SCP-5817 — SCP-5817 | Cost Breakdown

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SCP-5817 Unknown ~ medium confidence

SCP-5817

Expected annual

$9.5M

One-time setup

$26.6M

Annual recurring

$8.4M

Personnel

Initial setup (facility, technical installs, legal setups, and contingency reserves) is dominated by facility construction and hardened control equipment; recurring costs are driven by staff wages, legal/PR operations, compensation funds and continuous monitoring, totaling several million USD per year.

🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $26.6M

Facilities $10.0M

[#13] Site-68 facility construction and secure site buildout (vaults, generators, HVAC, physical security) estimated in mid-range of $2M–$50M.

Catastrophic Failure Contingency $10.0M

[#27] Seed allocation toward catastrophic public-disclosure contingency (acknowledged wide uncertainty; lower-bound contingency provided here).

Equipment $3.8M

[#2, #12, #20] Hardened telecom control appliances and exchange installs (#2), initial secure comms and hardware leases/purchases (#12), and initial tape/vault hardware (#20).

Legal Setup Per Country $1.0M

[#1] One-time legal/contractual setup per country for retainers, MOUs, negotiated compensation and emergency shutdown clauses (representative mid-range).

Insurance And Reserve Seed $1.0M

[#21] Initial insurance/contingency reserve seed funding to cover smaller unforeseen liabilities and start a reserve fund.

Initial Research And Lab Setup $900K

[#4, #5, #19] Initial secure storage and server install ($200k–$1M) (#4), initial automated capture/scraper software development ($100k–$500k) (#5), and initial forensic/sanitization tools/contracts ($50k–$300k) (#19).

🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $8.4M/yr

Staff Wages $3.0M/yr

[#6, #7, #8, #23] Salaries+benefits for on-call incident response team (8–20 FTEs) (#6), core cyber/takedown team payroll (#7), legal/policy payroll (#8), and baseline moderation staffing (#23).

Economic Compensation Fund $1.0M/yr

[#3, #16] Annualized compensation and emergency response funds to reimburse businesses, critical infrastructure, and affected civilians per incidents.

Facilities Maintenance $800K/yr

[#13] Ongoing site security contracts, utilities, generator fuel, HVAC maintenance and physical site upkeep.

Research And Monitoring $735K/yr

[#18, #11, #17, #5] Ongoing research budget (#18), cloud compute and global mirror scanning (#11), regular incident simulations and training (#17), and software maintenance/periodic updates for capture/indexing (#5).

Cover Story And Legal $500K/yr

[#8, #9] Baseline PR readiness, cover-story maintenance, and funds for immediate legal/policy actions and emergency filings.

National Shutdown Retainers $500K/yr

[#1] Recurring standby retainers for government/ISP cooperation per affected country (monthly retainers aggregated for baseline program).

Reserve Topups $500K/yr

[#21] Annual top-ups to insurance/contingency reserves to maintain an operational buffer against liabilities.

Diplomatic Fallout Mitigation $500K/yr

[#25] Ongoing budget for diplomatic smoothing payments, foreign aid gestures or cover payments when operations cross international sensitivities.

Logistics And Transport $400K/yr

[#15] Readiness pool and recurring costs for rapid-redeployment teams and in-country operatives (travel, vehicles, safehouses) for physical takedowns.

Supplies And Consumables $100K/yr

[#14] Power, networking, and regular consumables for data-center and capture operations.

Hardware Replacement $100K/yr

[#22] Lifecycle replacement budget (~20% of initial hardware budget/year).

Forensic Services $60K/yr

[#19] Ongoing forensic/sanitization contracts and services to sanitize logs and manage evidence denial workflows.

Per Operation Takedown Fees $50K/yr

[#10] Registrar/domain emergency fees, expedited filings, private investigators and ad-hoc takedown costs (per-operation budgets averaged annually).

Secure Comms Leasing $50K/yr

[#12] Recurring satellite bandwidth, leased private fiber and comms leases for redundancy and coordination.

Social Media Moderation Ops $50K/yr

[#23] Non-payroll operating costs for platform escalation workflows, paid takedown requests, and ad-hoc moderation tools (salary component included in staff_wages).

Domain Sinkhole Ops $50K/yr

[#24] Domain purchases, sinkhole hosting and management costs to proactively capture or prevent mirrors.

Personnel Healthcare $50K/yr

[#26] Healthcare, counseling and psychological support programs for staff exposed to anomalous content.

Tape Vaults Maintenance $25K/yr

[#20] Off-site tape/vault storage rotation, media refresh and off-site storage fees.

⚡ Cost Scenarios

📊 Baseline (baseline) $8.4M/yr

70.0% probability / year

Normal operational year with expected monitoring, monthly events handled within standard procedures and no major public incidents.

monthly_SCP_occurrences_handled no_uncontrolled_public_exposure

🚨 Minor Incident $8.9M/yr

25.0% probability / year +$500K vs baseline

Localized escalation requiring extra takedowns, per-incident compensation, increased PR and limited in-country deployments.

unexpected_mirrors_found localized_public_attention

🚨 Major Breach $28.4M/yr

5.0% probability / year +$20.0M vs baseline

High-profile containment failure or public disclosure requiring massive legal settlements, large-scale PR/compensation and operational overhaul.

catastrophic_public_disclosure international_diplomatic_crisis

👥 Personnel 30 total

Role	Count	Notes
Incident Response / Network Analysts	12	[#6] 24/7 monitoring and incident commanders; majority of operational headcount.
Cyber Operations / Takedown Agents	5	[#7] Core offensive/registrar takedown and obfuscation team.
Legal & Policy Staff	3	[#8] In-house counsel and international law specialists for rapid filings and liaison.
Public Relations / Disinformation Ops	2	[#9] PR managers and campaign coordinators for cover stories and crisis messaging.
Monitoring Analysts / Moderators	3	[#23] Human reviewers triaging automated flags and platform escalations.
Research Scientists	2	[#18] Study SCP-5817 mechanics and develop countermeasures and analysis tools.
Engineers / Maintenance	2	[#12, #22] Maintain secure comms, servers, and perform hardware lifecycle replacements.
Administrative Staff / Site Coordinator	1	[] Site-level administrative and coordination duties.

📋 Confidence Notes

Estimates derive from broad ranges in analyst notes and per-country variability; staffing and political/legal costs are reasonably well defined but many line items (diplomatic payments, catastrophic contingency) have high uncertainty, so confidence is medium.

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