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
Money is money. X% of something is always better than 100% of nothing.
I’m fine dealing with PayPal, but when I just tried to set up a monthly donation I had to identify twice and got stuck on a PayPal login site.
Now maybe that’s because I was in a webview inside a PWA (Voyager), but at the moment I have no clue if it worked or not.
In general I prefer not to do things like this in ephemeral webviews, but didn’t realize until I was halfway through and at that point I didn’t want to restart the process.
IMO too many clicks to contribute and I’m sure some people will be turned away by not being able to just click and give.
A lot of candidate donors might not want to commit to monthly donations and honestly it should just be a page with a few preset options/tiers and an “other amount” field. Followed by a button that says “pay with Apple Pay”, PayPal, Google wallet, or whatever else is trending.
Lowering the effort involved is important. You can ask for an email address for receipts afterwards if the payment service doesn’t have the option to provide one. Same with registration.