- cross-posted to:
- support@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- support@beehaw.org
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
There’s legal framework for making that more sure, but that’s a lot to ask I agree there’s no good answer to that question. You never know, a lot of people get blinded by money even if you’d never expect it from them. Just the way the world works you don’t know yourself even until the temptation is presented.
Clearly that’s not the goal and I do trust that they are more committed to their vision and morals than that, but it’s not something you can ever rule out entirely.
The issue when we bring in legality is the need for formal processes, oversight, validation, audit, blah blah blah and those come with (very) expensive administrative overheads. You quickly realize you need to have bookkeepers, legal counsel on retainer, a formal Board, charters, general meetings, all of which are likely to cost far (many times) more than just hosting costs.
I am not a lawyer, but I can quickly see overheads like these spiraling way out of control. Happy to be corrected by someone more knowledgeable than I am.