Beehaw

obligatory preface that 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.

this update is only because after a long round of troubleshooting with volunteer sysadmins and sysops yesterday, we committed to significant new expenses that have helped solve any errors that people were previously getting. our hopefully-final update of where we stand is a break-even of $54 a month or $648 a year. (please once again ignore OC's estimated yearly budget--we don't determine it lol)

our expenses are currently:

• $48/mo toward our host, Digital Ocean. (reversible. if we need to commit to further than this it is also likely we will seek another host since DO is on the expensive side)
• $2/mo for weekly backups
• $4/mo for daily snapshots of the website, which would allow us to restore the website in between the weekly backups if need be.

for a total of at least $54/mo in expenses. this may vary from month to month though, so we're baking in a bit of uncertainty with our estimation.

we currently have, for the month of June:

• $85/mo in recurring donations (at least for June)
• $620 this month in one-time donations

for a total of $705 this month. our total balance now stands at 726.51.

that balance means we now have about a year of reserves currently, if we received no other donations and have no unexpected expenses. i'm sure we'll have churn in our monthly donations and such though, so please don't hesitate to donate on our OpenCollective page if you'd like to keep the site going.

thanks folks!

hey folks, here's another meta-post. this one isn't specifically in response to the massive surge of users, but the surge is fortuitously timed because i've been intending to give a good idea of what our financial stability is like. as a reminder, we're 100%-user funded. everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us.

thanks to your generous support, we're pretty confident we have passed our current break-even point for this month, at which we wouldn't eventually need to pay out of our own pockets to keep the site running. that point in our estimation is about $26 a month or $312 a year. (please ignore OC's estimated yearly budget--we don't determine it lol)

our expenses are currently:

• $18/mo toward our host, Digital Ocean. (yesterday we upgraded from DO's $12 tier to its $18 tier to mitigate traffic issues and lag, and it's really worked out!)
• $2/mo for weekly backups
• $4/mo for daily snapshots of the website, which would allow us to restore the website in between the weekly backups if need be.

for a total of at least $26/mo in expenses. this may vary from month to month though, so we're baking in a bit of uncertainty with our estimation.

we currently have, for the month of June:

• $70/mo in recurring donations (at least for June)
• $200 this month in one-time donations

for a total of $270 this month. our total balance now stands at $331.31.

that balance means we now have about a year months of reserves currently, if we received no other donations and have no unexpected expenses.[^1] the recurring donations put us well into the green at this point.

this is good! everything past our break-even point each month is, to be clear, money we can save and put toward scaling up our infrastructure. there is no downside to donating after we've already met our "goal" of basic financial stability. doing so will have pretty straightforward practical implications for you: fewer 500s, 503s, better image support (this takes a lot of space!), and the website generally being run on more than potato hardware.[^2] if you'd like to do so in light of this information, our OpenCollective page is this post's link. thanks folks!

[^1]: we will have at least one upcoming expense but its size is TBD, and so is how we'll pay for it [^2]: especially during times like now, where we've likely been getting thousands or tens of thousands of hits an hour

Beehaw strives to be open about everything we do, including our state of affairs financially. As a reminder, you can view our financials and information about this website on the link in the post. Here's a quick recap of income we earned in 2022:

feb 18.33
mar 4.31
apr 0
may 8.96
jun 9.28
jul 0
aug 0
sep 38.76
oct 19.46
nov 5.52
dec 18.8
avg 11.22

We're currently earning a bit more on average per month than it cost to run our current server, but we will likely need to update how much storage we have available within the next year to support growth and ongoing activities. I'm unsure of the cost to do so as I'm not managing that part of the server, but for the sake of transparency wanted to highlight what's happening.

If you have any questions about how we run things feel free to chime in.

You may have noticed the recent additional paragraphs added to the sidebar. We are excited to have the Open Collective Foundation as our fiscal host.

Our site costs, approximately, ~~$10~~ $12 per month to operate.

As is stated on the sidebar:

At the time being we are not planning on having any profits. 100% of the costs will go towards server time, licensing costs, and artwork.