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.)

Hello folks, this is an impromptu emergency announcement.

In short: Open Collective Foundation, the fiscal host we use for Beehaw, will no longer accept donations starting on March 15, 2024. They will shut down completely at the end of the year, December 31, 2024. This was an extremely sudden decision by them; we were only made aware of it last night through their email to us. The cause given is “Open Collective Foundation’s business model is not sustainable with the number of complex services we have offered and the fees we pay to the Open Collective Inc. tech platform;” they note that they froze accepting new collectives last year.

This obviously presents a lot of problems for Beehaw. Here are all the relevant dates given to us by Open Collective:

• Last day to accept funds/receive donations: March 15, 2024
• Last day collectives can have employees: June 30, 2024
• Last day to spend or transfer funds: September 30, 2024
• Day they formally dissolve: December 31, 2024

Because Open Collective holds our funds, based on our understanding it seems likely we will not be able to keep our existing funds unless we find a 501©(3) organization to be our new fiscal host or become one ourselves by September 30. (EDIT: Or, we just spend it all preemptively.)

Open Collective Foundation’s also email writes that:

We will be providing assistance and support to you, whether you choose to spend out and close down your collective or continue your work through another 501©(3) organization or fiscal sponsor.

and so we’ll be contacting them as soon as possible to see if we can arrange a solution with just their help.

But: in the mean time (and in case they can’t help us, given the suddenness of this announcement) we need your help to find solutions–and we will probably need them urgently. If you have any help you can provide us, any services you can recommend, or anything that might help us quickly (and as painlessly as possible, given the short notice) transition to another service, that would be greatly appreciated. Fair warning that this will also likely derail the March financial update until we have a clearer picture of what we’ll do and if OCF can help us going forward.

Thanks, and hopefully we can resolve this situation without difficulty.