Open Collective
Open Collective
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Current Financial Snapshot
Published on December 7, 2022 by Alex Hillman

Greetings Citizens!

As promised in my previous post, we've just completed the migration of our funds collected to date over to this OpenCollective treasury. 

In addition to the public record keeping that OpenCollective provides, we'll try to provide periodic updates with additional transparency about the financial state of the server we share.

RECURRING DONORS MUST RE-SUBSCRIBE

⚠️This is important:
Going forward, no new donations will be collected through the old Liberapay account.


If you made a recurring donation before and have not specifically heard from us it's only because Liberapay made most of our donations (recurring and one-time) anonymous by default. If you'd like to continue helping us maintain the jawns.club servers you'll need to re-subscribe on OpenCollective.

This is annoying but it comes with a significant perk: all contributions made through OpenCollective are tax deductible! With OpenCollective Foundation as our fiscal sponsor, your funds technically route through their 501c3 org and are made available to us through carefully monitored expense accounts. You can read more about how that works here, if you're curious.

TREASURY SNAPSHOT

As of this update, we have $743.72 in our treasury. 100% of this budget comes from subscribers who contributed during the month of November with many contributing $4-5/month and with a 3, 6, or even 12 month pre-payment. 

CURRENT AND PROJECTED COSTS

At this moment our only fixed cost for running jawns.club is our managed server, which currently costs $49/month or $588/year.

Our payment processing also eats the usual 3%, and we pay 5% to OpenCollective for being our fiscal host.

That said, our hosting costs have grown by 5x in just the last couple of months. In addition to increasing the processing speed that keeps our sever feeling snappy, the two biggest factors that drive our server costs are database and media storage.

Both of these storage costs grow with additional new users joining our server, but also with the growth of activity in our connected fediverse as well. (Without getting into the technical weeds, Mastodon temporarily stores a portion of all posts, media, and avatars from ALL users on servers connected to ours. So this can grow exponentially.)

Bottom line: It's possible that our server and storage costs will be stable for a while, but it's also possible that they'll increase. 

ESTIMATED RUNWAY

If our costs do NOT change, our current treasury will fund approximately 15 months of our server.
If costs DO change, that runway can shrink substantially, and fast. 😬

Our current treasury provides a strong financial foundation but without recurring donations in place we risk running our treasury down without active replenishment.

Recurring monthly and annual contributions, even small ones make a huge difference! One-time contributions are welcome as well.

HOW YOU CAN HELP!

  • Set up a recurring contribution today, either monthly or annually. Or make a one-time contribution, every bit really helps. 
  • Help spread the word about our OpenCollective page by posting about it on jawns.club: https://opencollective.com/jawnsclub
  • If you blog, write about why you support jawns.club!
  • If you have friends who are on jawns.club, ask them if they've made a contribution. If they can afford any amount, consider setting up your contributions together!
  • Help us come up with ideas for how to make our server a fun and valuable way to find community online. Drop your admins (@alex and @skyfaller) a mention or DM.
  • If you can't support financially, spread words of encouragement to your fellow jawns.club members and the mods. 

QUESTIONS?

Drop us an email [email protected].

Beyond that, be excellent to each other. 

Your humble admins, Alex & Nelson
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