Reporting Web 3D Capabilities on a Budget of $3 a Month

Summary

I run Web3DSurvey.com as a community service. It collects real-world WebGL, WebGL 2, and WebGPU capability data so 3D web developers can pick features from measured support rates instead of guessing. I have written about why I built it and what the v2 rewrite added. This post is about a different question people keep asking me: what does it cost to run, and how does the pipeline hold up? In April 2026 the services that serve the site and store the data cost about C$3. During June 2026 the collector received roughly half a million requests. Each request carried one sample with up to 596 data points, for close to 300 million data points a month. I started this project in early 2023 to learn React and BigQuery, neither of which I had used in production. The learning stuck, and so did the low bill. The architecture separates collection, reporting, and the costs of running both. Collector# What the collector measures# The collector is a small script that a 3D site embeds through an iframe. After probing the browser for WebGL, WebGL 2, WebGPU, WebXR, and device capabilities, it submits the resulting stats object to the api server. The dedicated api-server drops bot traffic, adds normalized platform, browser, and engine fields, then inserts samples into BigQuery in batches of ten (which cuts down on the BigQuery bills). I initially used the legacy streaming insert API but I replaced it with the BigQuery Storage Write API. The current volume fits inside its monthly free ingestion allowance, so this reduced significantly my BigQuery costs. Reducing client impact# The collector is meant to be polite to host pages. Participating sites embed it as a tiny iframe rather than running the collector script directly in their own page. This achieves two separate things: security -- it prevents the collector script from accessing anything in the host page, and performance -- it avoid the collector script from slowing down the host page: <iframe title="Web3D Survey" src="https://web3dsu...