obligatory preface: we’re 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us. you can donate here.
after a few months, we’re finally stable enough to put another one of these out. to make a long story short: getting our money out of the old collective and into the new one was actually much more of a mess than we thought—and very little of the functionality we expected came to fruition—so it’s essentially taken us six months to re-establish our financial situation.
August’s numbers are:
overall expenses this month: $183.58
$142.13 for hosting the site
- $112.00 for hosting the site itself
- $22.40 for backups
- $7.73 for site snapshots
$28.80 for Hive, an internal chat platform we’ve set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)
- $24.00 for hosting Hive
- $4.80 for backups
~$4.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into
- $0.00 for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam - we currently don’t send enough emails to trigger the threshold for payment)
- ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)
$8.49 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that’s standalone from Digital Ocean)
overall contributions this month: $176.28
unsurprisingly, the mess of a switch-over, the several months it’s taken to sort everything out, and our minimal encouragement of donations in the interim of sorting things out has resulted in a decrease in funding. for the first time in a long time, we’re not breaking even—and without the one-time donation we’d be out about $100 this month.
breakdown:
- 15 monthly contributions, totaling $80.82
- 0 yearly contributions, totaling $0.00
- 1 one-time donation, totaling $95.46
total end of month balance: $6,849.83
expense runway, assuming no further donations: about 3 years
this dovetails into an announcement we need to make: we need your help to gradually rebuild our donation base. to be clear, we are obviously not in any danger of shutting down right now—but we have taken a very material hit in terms of finances[1] and as a result we’re now running off of the financial cushion you’ve given us. even though we have a long expense runway, we’d like to proactively return to breaking even and not having to think about how much we’re losing per month.
our current monthly contributions are about $100 short of breaking even, so consider that our rough financial goal. please donate if you are able.
unfortunately—and as mentioned at the top—the tools to switch over any previous subscription you may have had on Open Collective Foundation don’t appear to exist. this means you will have to manually resubmit your information on Open Collective Europe Foundation if you haven’t already. (we may or may not send out a mass-email to our current/previous donors in the future to this effect.)
The differential between what we would have had OCF stayed up and what we do have on OCEF now could be as high as $4,600. That is split between the six months of paused donations (likely $3,000-$3,600, averaging our financial reports previously) and the six months of hosting expenses we’ve covered with our cushion (likely around $1,000-$1,200 given our hosting costs have not changed). We’re also now losing a slightly larger cut of what we take in. In sum: we’ve lost out on a lot of potential runway for the site. ↩︎
to make a long story short: getting our money out of the old collective and into the new one was actually much more of a mess than we thought
For anyone curious about the details, I had to step in to help ensure this actually happened because, well, tax law is complicated and none of us are experts. Ultimately our current financial host OCE had to bring on a US-based company in order to allow a transfer of tax-exempt funding. On top of that, we had to submit an application and enter an agreement with this partner company so that they could open a bank account on our behalf because having a bank account and agreement with OCE was not enough. What a headache!
Thanks for everyone who set up donations on OCE as soon as we transitioned, that was actually super helpful! For the rest of you who used to donate and were waiting for us to be fully transitioned over to OCE to restart your donations, you are free to do so now, and given our current deficit it would be most appreciated!
This is presented in a confusing way to me. But I see after reading it twice that monthly recurring contributions are $80.82 per month (I’m assuming this is after fees that OCEF charges).
You have set a rough target of increasing that monthly recurring contributions amount to about $185 so that one off contributions aren’t being relied upon to meet monthly expenses.
This seems like a very reasonable ask and very attainable.
I’m copying a monthly donation link here for people that don’t want to scroll back up:
https://opencollective.com/beehaw-collective/donate?interval=month
This is presented in a confusing way to me. But I see after reading it twice that monthly recurring contributions are $80.82 per month (I’m assuming this is after fees that OCEF charges).
yes–this is why all the contribution numbers are weird and non-round. i believe we also lose out something like 5-6% to fees vs. the previous 3-4% fees we had on Open Collective Foundation—smaller donations definitely get punished a bit more heavily now.
Are those fees related to the platform tip or are they something else?
Beehaw uses Open Collective Europe Foundation (OCEF) as a fiscal host.
OCEF charges an 8% Host Fee on Revenue
OCEF uses the Open Collective Platform for the various functions and services it provides (like payment processing and accounting tools)
The Open Collective Platform charges a 15% Revenue Share for Fiscal Hosts that collect donations through the platform.
Any tip given to the platform does not go to Beehaw at all.
All of the above is in addition to payment processing fees charged by Stripe.
i forget the exact reason but i believe it has something to do with OCEF being in Europe, which means taxes, exchange rates, and other annoying variables like that come into play for us which weren’t previously contributors on OCF
platform tip
Not tip. Something else. Given how much they are getting off each exchange, I feel like tipping is not needed. I checked a few recent donations and took a picture. The most recent transactions are on top.
When someone donates, any tip is excluded from the Beehaw contribution and the Beehaw part is listed. Immediately above it two fees are subtracted from the Beehaw donation: A ‘stripe’ fee and a ‘Host’ fee. So Beehaw never gets your actual donation and the Host always gets a cut.
Edit: attached image shows how a $10 and a $50 donation is each charged as well as showing part of a more recent $10 donation with slightly different stripe fee.
I’m on TV mom!
Ouch! I hope no one minds that I left the publicly available info intact. No actual names or anything scary like credit card numbers were in there.
No worries from me
Glad to support the platform now that its possible again. Thanks for all your hard work keeping it alive.
I’m happy to donate a few bucks a month. Better than dealing with an algorithm and ads.
I’ve not been around for a while, but last time I was here there was talk of moving off of Lemmy and on to a different kind of fediverse. Is that still the case or will we be remaining on Lemmy?
still the case (but the same fediverse); we move at the pace of development and unfortunately that has slowed a bit in the case of Sublinks
Take my $5 a month, worth it to keep this place running.
OK. Thank you
