Piotr Zieliński runs a classifieds site for agricultural equipment near Bydgoszcz. Last year it carried 6,200 active listings, served 310,000 page views a month, and cost him 41,000 złoty to operate, about $10,200. He keeps a spreadsheet of every line. “The server is the joke,” he said. “Every real cost on this sheet is a person or a problem.”
The joke is cheap. Zieliński’s hosting runs on a dedicated box in a Warsaw datacenter for 289 złoty a month, with backups to object storage at another 60. Domain renewal, an SSL certificate, and a transactional email service push infrastructure to roughly $110 a month. Everything else on the spreadsheet is people and problems.
Moderation eats the hours
Two people review listings on the site: Zieliński for two hours a day and a part-time moderator in Toruń at 38 złoty an hour. Together they handle about 120 flagged items a week, mostly duplicate car ads and misfiled equipment. The moderator’s 2025 pay came to 23,400 złoty, the largest line in the budget.
The work is repetitive and specific. A tractor listing with three photos and a phone number clears in 40 seconds. A suspicious one takes ten minutes and sometimes a phone call to the seller. Zieliński prices his own time at 100 złoty an hour when he totals the sheet. By that count, moderation costs the site more than everything technical combined.
He tried outsourcing in 2024, paying a firm in Kraków 1,800 złoty a month to pre-screen listings. They approved a run of scam tractor ads in week three. Zieliński canceled the contract and went back to the queue himself.
What spam actually costs
Spam arrives in waves rather than a steady drip. In 2025 the site blocked 88,000 automated registration attempts and about 3,400 listings that were scams or pure advertising. A CAPTCHA and a filter for throwaway email domains stopped most of it at the door. The rest reached review.
The filters get rewritten twice a year. One rule that blocks the word ‘deposit’ in listing text has caught 400 scams and exactly one honest seller, who wanted a deposit for a custom-built trailer. Zieliński keeps a list of exceptions and reads it whenever the block log looks strange.
One wave in March got through. Scammers copied real tractor listings at half price, asked for deposits by bank transfer, and collected from four buyers before the pattern surfaced. Zieliński refunded 6,200 złoty out of pocket, changed his listing-approval rules, and wrote the loss into the sheet under a row he labeled “education.”
Where the money comes from
The site pays for itself on paid listings and dealer subscriptions. Individual sellers pay 15 złoty to list an item for 60 days. Equipment dealers pay 400 złoty a month for bulk posting and a badge. In 2025 those two lines brought in 96,000 złoty against the 41,000 in costs, which leaves Zieliński about 55,000 złoty for roughly 20 hours of his week.
He has been asked why he keeps the site at that size. The margin per listing falls the moment he adds staff, and the buyers know it as a local trade board, which is the product. “You can run one of these alone if you answer emails the same day,” he said. “The day you stop, the sellers leave.”