our June 2023 financial update.
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.
because of the unique circumstances of this month i won't report an expected yearly expense like i did last time. that'll probably come next month, when our finances are closer to a useful baseline.
overall expenses this month: $566.98
this is a mighty looking expense, but only $371.98 of it is infrastructure (and even less of that is actually site hosting).
$312.54 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into
- $241.47 for hosting the site itself
- $48.29 for backups
- $11.87 for site snapshots
- $10.91 for bandwidth overage (1091.10GB @ $0.01/GB)
$15.28 for Hive, an internal chat platform we're trying to set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean, but distinct enough to break out from overall DO hosting)
- $13.89 for hosting Hive
- $1.39 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)
$5/mo for 1TB of backup storage with BackBlaze (redundant backup system that's standalone from Digital Ocean)
the remaining $195 of this month's expenses have gone to paying @[email protected] for his community icons. we do so at a rate of $5 per icon and he's done 39 of them for us (36 of which are live so far).
overall: we definitely think we're able to downsize infrastructure costs going forward. we're already investigating how best to do that (both in terms of host and overall cost)--there's no ETA for a few reasons, but this month should not be representative of many more subsequent months.
overall contributions this month: $3,870.44
we also have an incredible amount of support, so that really helps things as far as "being able to take time to get everything right". according to OpenCollective, we currently have approximately:
- 97 monthly contributions, totaling $549.58
- 9 yearly contributions, totaling $254.99
- 149 one-time donations, totaling $3,065.87
between monthly and yearly contributions, this means we are still more-or-less breaking even and sustainable overall with this month's costs. obviously, we would like to be substantially moreso though, through either lower costs, more donations, or a combination of both.
total end of month balance: $3,591.33
- yes yes, this is already out of date by a bunch. expect it to be like that, i use UTC for our reports lol.
expense runway, assuming no further donations
- assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about 6 months and 10 days of runway
- assuming just expenses like our infrastructure this month: we have 10 and a half months of runway
if you'd like to make the runway longer (and reward us for even having this site up today after yesterday's complete fiasco), now is a good time to donate :)
Thank you for your hard work, and thanks to the donators for making this possible!
Apologies if this has been asked elsewhere, I haven't seen it: How are the core team compensated for their work on the platform? I appreciate that it's a passion project, but I'm sure y'all have bills to pay.
short answer: we aren't.
long answer: we extremely aren't. the person who has financially benefited the most from running the site is the person who makes our icons, because we try to pay a fair wage to people whose labor we use that isn't our own. the site quite literally would not be able to function if we were compensated for doing this--on our end-of-month balance we'd fund about a week of work total between all of us, assuming the quite-low-by-software-standards $15/hr wage.
can't speak for the other mods but i currently benefit from not having a job and not technically having bills to pay. i assume the others have jobs which cover their expenses but as you can probably infer this means we can't do this as a full time job which makes it vital it doesn't become one
Thanks for the transparency. There's a big appetite for this sort of platform, so I hope you're able to lean on other volunteers to avoid overloading yourselves.