Thank you @epowell101 for your feedback.
Here are our answers to your questions:
Question 
Spendings for software as a service does show up in the budget breakdown. However, the visibility of SaaS expenses could have been outlined more clearly.
SaaS expenses for cloud / data center are considered to be part of the initiative Data Empowerment in our percentage split estimates. The current cost is < $250/month for Google Cloud Platform & Github.
At some point we might look into and explore decentralized cloud solutions.
Question 
Yes, but not a significantly (< $1,000 monthly) anytime in the next 3-6 months. Much of what we are doing is making
- great documentation for which subgraphs and open web3 APIs are best
- keeping current data sets clean for crowdsourced analysis.
Neither FDD nor our initiative Data Empowerment is intended to be a data services organization.
Question 
This is a spicy 
question.
Our current answer is: We highlight that FDD is aiming to protocolize solutions, not to be a services company of any sort. That said, there are definitely avenues for monetization including spinning out a service DAO or even building and owning digital public infrastructure for sharing data, feature and model engineering for ML, and crowdsourcing data science insights.
However, one could argue and ask: why does protocolizing seem to be at odds with generating revenue? Which one applies:
- Revenue XOR Protocolizing
- Revenue OR Protocolizing
The need is for buy in from the rest of the DAO and stewards to give us the freedom to discover where the value is.
To make that happen, the stewards community would have to reconsider their decision, because they voted DOWN a discovery for a revenue-generating sybil detection DAO. We understood that the driver behind this decision was continually viewing attempts of revenue generation as “defecting”.
Question 
@DisruptionJoe has been leading most of alignment conversions and he outlines:
One area is our work toward solutions which decentralize the moderation inputs to a grant round. User and grant moderation is one of our core competencies. Our bottoms up suggestions all recommend that we build digital public infrastructure to sustainably serve these needs in a credibly neutral way that is equally accessible to all the communities that will run their own rounds in the future.
The stewards, guided by a few strong opinions, however, have pushed us to centralize our efforts for efficiency and simply execute until a time when the other workstreams can design protocol-based solutions. One of our strengths is Protocol Research. We believe our research could be much better utilized to align roadmaps and context awareness across the DAO.
Here are some hands-on examples:
Example 1 - Using Ethelo for scaling grant reviews
Example 2 - Discovery for Sybil Detection DAO
Example 3 - Shutting down the community model only to be wowed by a presentation of on-chain features.
And …
The best example - We couldn’t get our contributors’ Data Access to cGrants database until last season for all but Blockscience. We couldn’t tinker with data to improve rounds over rounds.
So then we literally moved the whole SAD model to be run by the DAO with no way to get or check data other than requesting it from Blockscience and scraping it. (We didn’t have any access to data prior to season 14.)
We like to highlight that alignment efforts made by other workstreams, especially GPC, since last budget season have made drastic improvements for us in all the mentioned areas. We do feel the results of better communication about these issues.
Hope this helps 