# 5.2 Operating costs Some of the costs associated with running the VEME DAO and the VEME ecosystem consist of the following: Tech stack management and development A dedicated team needs to be incentivized in order to actively manage and advance upon previous VeFi, Voltage and DAO Launchpad builds. Examples to consider are: * Continuous development of integrations and implementation of advancements. * Continuous testing on the security of the protocol as the application layer of the solution. * Continuous research on developing our own advancements. Different incentivization models are possible within the DAO; below are some suggestions: * Part of protocol/treasury revenue generated flows directly into the development pod’s treasury; most common. Disties DAO success from protocol development. Development is directly incentivized by how well the protocol is performing. * The proposal per proposal based, development of the protocol is dependent on the success of the DAO. * Initial stake funded to the development treasury. **DAO Management** As listed above a DAO has dedicated members running it. Different models can be used to decide on how those members are compensated. Regularly they are on a fixed payroll by the DAO. **Proposal payouts to pods and community members** Proposals made by pods and community members are written in order to benefit the value of the ecosystem as a whole. --- # Agent Instructions: Querying This Documentation If you need additional information that is not directly available in this page, you can query the documentation dynamically by asking a question. Perform an HTTP GET request on the current page URL with the `ask` query parameter: ``` GET https://veme-master.gitbook.io/dao/5.-finance/5.2-operating-costs.md?ask= ``` The question should be specific, self-contained, and written in natural language. The response will contain a direct answer to the question and relevant excerpts and sources from the documentation. Use this mechanism when the answer is not explicitly present in the current page, you need clarification or additional context, or you want to retrieve related documentation sections.