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. ↩︎
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.
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.
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.
