September financial update—and Beehaw needs your help rebuilding our donation base
September financial update—and Beehaw needs your help rebuilding our donation base
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.)
[^1]: 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.