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1y ago

the August 2023 Beehaw financial update

opencollective.com Contribute - Open Collective

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.

overall expenses this month: $523.79

as expected, a full month of running on last month's setup has come in pretty high. luckily, we expect downsizing to begin this month (and we have a pretty good idea of what we're going to do) so this will be our last month of costs at this scale. our initial estimation is that we can halve or better what we're paying now on a monthly basis.

$428.73 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into

$336.00 for hosting the site itself
$67.20 for backups
$25.53 for site snapshots

$28.87 for Hive, an internal chat platform we've set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)

$24.07 for hosting Hive
$4.80 for backups

~$39.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into

$35/mo for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam)
~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)

$22.87 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)

overall contributions this month: $1,310.90

support still more than covers our expenses, and particularly with our upcoming downsizing we don't believe this will be a problem. breakdown is:

100 monthly contributions, totaling $624.95
2 yearly contributions, totaling $67.10
36 one-time donations, totaling $618.85

between monthly and yearly contributions we are still sustainable overall—but now that the Reddit bump has ebbed most of our savings will come in the form of lowering costs and not "sheer amount of money being thrown our way."

total end of month balance: $4,347.79

expense runway, assuming no further donations

assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about 8 months and one week of runway

Beehaw Support @beehaw.org

the July 2023 Beehaw financial update

opencollective.com /beehaw/donate

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89 comments

Hey just a thought, but have you considered also measuring your labor in terms of hours worked by admin staff etc? I'm assuming it's unpaid.
I think showing the financials is great but to me it shows only one part of the picture, if that makes sense. Your work has value!
I really appreciate all the work that goes into this place, and really, thanks for all you do.
- I would wager I've spent between 40-70hours a week working on Beehaw directly or on things relating to it with as high as 90hours a week at the peak - I would wake up, open Beehaw, eat, sleep. None of us get paid for this, it would likely bankrupt Beehaw in less than a week if we were paid even minimum wage. The only reason I can do this is because I don't have a job - which is putting me in a bad financial situation honestly.. I really should've gotten a job but I didn't.
  Thank you for the appreciation.
  
  Surely that isn’t sustainable for you or beehaw? On the one hand, please take care to look after your own best interests. We really appreciate your work, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of your well-being.
  On the other hand, if the project is based on full time volunteer work by people who can’t afford to volunteer full time over the long term, surely that is a major risk to the long term viability of the instance?
  
  I really do appreciate the work you put into Beehaw, but to echo what others have said, I don't think anyone wants this to be unsustainable for you, or anyone else working on Beehaw.
  At the least I think it could be reported as part of donations/expenses? Rough numbers would be fine too (because the overhead of tracking hours is not fun). So I'm imagining something like:
  400 hours unpaid work (2 full time people working, 1 part-time) (if paid, that's $6,000 at minimum wage, $8,800 at a livable wage)
  Which is a lot of money, and very scary, but at least it makes the behind-the-scenes work visible.
  That said, I'm going to go set up a monthly donation now 🤗
  
  I would rather see ads or something than having someone work that hard for no pay to keep it going. Have you thought about other potential revenue streams, or would you like to workshop or discuss options?

If this level of transparency was available for various news and other social sites, I'd be more likely to buy a subscription to them.
The honesty is great and makes this feel more like an actual community or a co-op.
I'll be curious to see how these numbers change, both the monthly cost and the amount of contributions, as more and more people join up.
- Agree with everything in this comment, especially
  makes this feel more like an actual community or a co-op.
  🥰 TOTALLY, and it makes me feel very good about my recurring donation - the people running the server care, I care, pretty much everybody interacting here really, truly cares about the community, I genuinely love supporting that. This is a beautiful place on the internet.

I love the amount of transparency in this post!

Keep up the great work y'all 🫶

Here, have some money
- What is your intent with a comment like this? Anything constructive we can address for you?
  
  What is your intent with a comment like this?
  they were being quite literal [i got their donation email :)]
  
  I don’t think there’s anything wrong with encouraging other people to donate, even if they are peacocking a little bit.

I wish there was a link to donate at the end of this post.
- Yeah this is absolutely the right place for it, at the bottom of a post that will attract almost exclusively people who care about the financials
- Yeah.. it's at the top as the link for the post
  
  Well, maybe it needs to be in 2 places for dummies like me. Lol. I kicked in a few bucks. Thanks. For what you do, friend.

Thank you for the transparency! It is important to remember that it's not just the amazing work the mods do here but there is a real cost to running this.

Thanks for posting, it's really interesting to see what goes into running something like this.
Chucked a bit into the pot. It's not a lot but I want to contribute where I can.

Y’all are doing yeopeople’s work! The transparency is much appreciated.

I love these breakdowns of the financing! Thanks for all your work and communication, it really makes me feel like a stakeholder in the community instead of a string in a database.

I love to see the transparency. Thank you for facilitating such a great online experience.

As always, thank you for your transparency! <3

Hey there - I work in film production and have a fair bit of HDD space just laying around. How much do you need to be useful for backups? Happy to contribute some hardware to the cause if it’s at all remotely useful and host a local backup as one more offsite redundancy for you. That being said, I don’t really know what your data storage demands are.
- Current requirements are about 50GB a day, and keeping 7 days prior, and one a week (about 300GB a month) for backups alone, not keeping more than a month. Also using backblaze B2 as a standard for that storage now.

A thought I’ve had for a little bit now is what is making sure Beehaw isn’t sold off? I have no doubt in the current intentions of the admins, but as Beehaw grows it can become very valuable for data companies. If this wonderful community thrives, there will be eventually be people and companies making offers to buy everything we’ve built. Is there any plan to ensure Beehaw doesn’t sell out? I’ve been burned before, and I want to ensure that if I’m going to contribute financially that I won’t lose Beehaw.
- I mean, that's a question of trust. There's nothing I can do other than promise that I or any of the admins would never sell off Beehaw.
  That said, if it reassures you, our disregard for "growth for the sake of growth" should push away any kind of company seeking money. It'd be much more lucrative to go for a big instance like lemmy.world.
  How could we do more than ask for trust?
  
  Speaking of that instance... has there been any progress on federating with them again?
  I was surprised to see little talk about Donald's Jan6th charges on my feed, but after flipping accounts I realised most of the chatter was going on over there.
  I don't particularly mind if I need a dedicated LW account... but it would be nice to be able to keep my posts consolidated under this one.
  
  I recommend turning Beehaw into a cooperative where to be a member one has to contribute monthly financially. I understand this is no easy task, and am only sharing my best idea. I really like this place.
- Our 'Northern Star' (or guiding principle) has been, for over two years, 'be(e) nice'. This is the ONLY objective that we have.
  
  That doesn't answer the question...
  
  I think it’s a very good one. It conveys what kind of atmosphere you’re trying to achieve, but remains flexible enough that it allows unique responses to unique situations. You don’t get bogged down by people who think they’re cleverly almost breaking the rules, but not quite.
- To this question, I think a potential solution would be if this community were to transition into a collaborative organization (i.e. co-op, socialist collective, etc.). Such that the ownership is not concentrated in a small private group and the potential acquisition/buyout/selling-of-data requires a decision process that incorporates the concent/buy-in from the entire community/collective.
  In no way am I suggesting this needs to happen, but I would support such a movement.

It would be nice if I could donate via Apple Pay. Any plans for supporting that? Open Collective doesn't appear to support it.
- apple pay takes too much of your money for being a middleman
  
  Open Collective accepts PayPal. AFAIK PayPal takes a larger cut of the transaction than Apple Pay does.
  I know that Beehaw != Open Collective, so I'm not asking for any changes there. Just curious if there are any other plans to accept donations through other methods.
  
  Money is money. X% of something is always better than 100% of nothing.
  I’m fine dealing with PayPal, but when I just tried to set up a monthly donation I had to identify twice and got stuck on a PayPal login site.
  Now maybe that’s because I was in a webview inside a PWA (Voyager), but at the moment I have no clue if it worked or not.
  In general I prefer not to do things like this in ephemeral webviews, but didn’t realize until I was halfway through and at that point I didn’t want to restart the process.
  IMO too many clicks to contribute and I’m sure some people will be turned away by not being able to just click and give.
  A lot of candidate donors might not want to commit to monthly donations and honestly it should just be a page with a few preset options/tiers and an “other amount” field. Followed by a button that says “pay with Apple Pay”, PayPal, Google wallet, or whatever else is trending.
  Lowering the effort involved is important. You can ask for an email address for receipts afterwards if the payment service doesn’t have the option to provide one. Same with registration.
- Isn't Apple Pay a payment service provider?

I feel like those of us who have contributed should receive in return an adorable cat gif.
Not like, to display or anything. Just something happy that bounces in our mailboxes after we contribute. Maybe the cat is wearing a hat! Or maybe the cat has gotten into a humorous predicament. Or maybe the cat is riding a dog. Or a human! The possibilities are endless, the joy boundless; and pragmatically speaking, it makes our monthly receipts for donation slide ride on through with less risk of begrudging it :D
I am not a business cat and you should not take this as business advice
- Can I ask what is perhaps a very silly question - why are you advocating for cute cat gifs as thanks on BEEhaw, shouldn't it be adorable bee gifs? We contribute, and the little bee gathers up pollen and then poots a happy little glitter confetti pollen fart or something? Idk.
  I'm allergic as fuck to bees and wasps, I had a bad wasp encounter last year that has left me with PTSD regarding everybody who goes BUZZ BUZZ, I vastly prefer cats and dogs as animals to share space with - but this is Beehaw, it just seems totally wrong for any official anything to not involve bees.
  
  PTSD
  Bee TSD
  
  I just figured the cat gif well was deeper than the bee gif well. I didn't want them to move heaven and earth, just tape a piece of candy to the receipt, yanno?
- Ljdawson does this with his sync app - if you buy premium you get a nice little notification
- @alyaza @dax

I love this website and the transparency, sustainability and support. Super nice.

Have you considered merch
- Yes but merch is a lot of work to do in an ethical way. We also would prefer to pay the people designing the merch than ourselves so it's not something we'd consider using for fundraising.

89 comments