SCP-8746 — SCP-8746 | Cost Breakdown

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SCP-8746 Thaumiel ~ medium confidence

SCP-8746

Expected annual

$10.1M

One-time setup

$7.8M

Annual recurring

$9.9M

Personnel

Estimated one-time capital costs are approximately $7.75M, driven by containment cells, archive/setup, and lab buildout; recurring annual costs are roughly $9.90M, dominated by personnel (SREs, analysts, IR), hosting/CDN, per-item processing, and contingency reserves.

🏗️ One-Time Capital Costs Total: $7.8M

Facilities $4.7M

[#13, #14, #29] Secure evidence/archive physical setup, containment cell construction (modular cells for recovered dolls), and scale-up/dedicated facility/domain acquisition reserve.

Initial Research And Lab Setup $1.2M

[#16] Specialized lab buildout and instrumentation (parapsychology/thaumaturgy lab, EM analysers, spectral cameras, cryogenic storage, electrophysiology rigs).

Equipment $1.1M

[#2, #14] One-time on-prem hardware option for DB/block cluster and installed containment sensors/Faraday enclosures and observation equipment for cells.

Teatime Development $500K

[#5] One-time development of TEATIME web crawler, NLP classifiers, change-detection pipeline, and snapshot storage tooling.

Redaction Tooling Development $150K

[#21] One-time development of automated scrubbing/redaction tooling and MediaWiki extensions to prevent memetic propagation.

🔄 Annual Recurring Costs Total: $9.9M/yr

Staff Wages $4.5M/yr

[#4, #7, #8, #12, #16] DTF-J6 SREs/web-dev/DBAs/security engineers, content-moderation analysts, liaison officers, incident-response/forensics staff, and research staff wages (fully-burdened).

Per Item Processing $1.0M/yr

[#17] Quarantine, intake QA, instrumentation, monitoring, and observation/testing costs per seized doll (baseline intake assumption).

Contingency Reserve $1.0M/yr

[#25] Rapid-response fund for emergency takedown, PR blitz, accelerated containment, and mass suppression actions.

Logistics And Transport $700K/yr

[#15] Mobile Task Force standing budget for vehicles, secure transport crates, travel, fuel, maintenance, and rapid-deployment logistics.

Hosting Cdn $600K/yr

[#1] Dedicated multiregion cloud hosting, CDN, DDoS protection, enterprise SLAs, and high-egress bandwidth for ~100k active users.

Fellowships Grants $300K/yr

[#26] Long-term archival/research fellowships and grant funding for study of anomalies discovered via SCP-8746.

Teatime Operations $250K/yr

[#6] Ongoing TEATIME operation, model retraining, crawl compute, human review queue, and storage for crawled snapshots.

Incident Response Ops $200K/yr

[#12] Forensic software, emergency fast-response compute, digital quarantine operations, and readiness costs for staff-targeted incidents.

Research Lab Consumables $200K/yr

[#16] Recurring lab consumables, technician time for experiments, and instrument upkeep for specialized analysis.

Database Cluster $180K/yr

[#2] Managed DB/replication/caching instances or equivalent cloud DB spend to maintain responsiveness under high concurrency.

Cover Story And Legal $150K/yr

[#10] Baseline legal/PR retainer, search-engine takedown efforts, and narrative management to dismiss leak as roleplay.

Medical And Insurance $150K/yr

[#18] Counseling, medical treatment, trauma support, and special insurance for staff exposed to hostile/memetic content.

Energy And Colocation $120K/yr

[#23] Power, cooling, and colocation costs for any Foundation-owned racks or mirrors.

Red Team $120K/yr

[#24] Penetration testing, memetic propagation simulations, and exercises to test PR/TEATIME efficacy.

Facilities Maintenance $100K/yr

[#13, #14, #29] Ongoing maintenance, physical security, and rotation for archive/containment infrastructure.

Storage Object Store $90K/yr

[#3] Object storage costs for primary images, thumbnails, backups, and version history (hot/cold storage tiers).

Supplemental Fundraising $50K/yr

[#9] Grants, hosting credits, micro-donations, and payments to hosting providers to preserve availability/cooperation.

Protective Opsec $45K/yr

[#19] Training, compliance monitoring, legal briefings, and audits to prevent prohibited-material production.

Liaison Discretionary $30K/yr

[#8] Discretionary fund for sanctioned transfers/donations and small operational expenses associated with liaison outreach.

Redaction Tooling Maintenance $30K/yr

[#21] Ongoing maintenance for automated scrubbing/sanitization tools and human-in-the-loop moderation costs.

Compliance And Liability $30K/yr

[#27] Legal/HR costs for policy enforcement, indemnities, and handling grievances tied to the VioletFright clause.

Supplies And Consumables $20K/yr

[#28] PPE, containment seals, batteries, evidence bags, replacement parts, and small consumables.

Background Checks $20K/yr

[#20] Enhanced vetting, hardware tokens, biometric checks, and account-audit costs.

Domain Dns $10K/yr

[#11] Registrar fees, DNSSEC, privacy, and small domain purchases for aliases and registrar redundancy.

Backup Moderation Accounts $5K/yr

[#22] Verified Foundation accounts, key rotation, logging, and operational identity costs for contact accounts.

Research And Monitoring $0/yr

[]

⚡ Cost Scenarios

📊 Baseline (baseline) $9.9M/yr

91.0% probability / year

Standard operational year with no major public incidents; normal hosting, staffing, monitoring, and processing volumes.

steady intake rates no public leak normal incident volumes

🚨 Minor Incident $10.8M/yr

8.0% probability / year +$900K vs baseline

Moderate public attention or targeted leak requiring emergency PR/legal action and short-term surge in containment/processing.

localized leak or viral article focused DDoS or takedown pressure

🚨 Major Breach $20.9M/yr

1.0% probability / year +$11.0M vs baseline

Widespread public exposure with mass activations, large-scale intake of anomalous dolls, and necessity to rapidly purchase containment capacity.

site widely publicized mass activation of userbase rapid influx of recovered anomalies

👥 Personnel 31 total

Role	Count	Notes
Engineer / SRE / DBA	9	[#4] DTF-J6 technical staff (SREs, web devs, DBAs) required to operate and harden the site and infrastructure.
Content Moderator / Analyst	12	[#7] Content moderation and anomaly triage team for 24/7 review and human-in-the-loop classification.
Liaison Officer	3	[#8] Authorized liaisons to interact with SCP-8746 editors and manage cooperative containment communications.
Incident Response / Forensics	4	[#12] On-call IR/forensic staff to handle curses, staff-targeted incidents, and digital quarantines.
Research Scientist	3	[#16] Specialized research staff for parapsychology/thaumaturgy analysis and lab testing.

📋 Confidence Notes

Estimates are order-of-magnitude based on analyst ranges for hosting, staffing, and per-item processing; uncertainty remains in intake rate of dolls, degree of required on-prem hardware vs. cloud, and frequency of public incidents.

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