this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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Beehaw Support

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Support and meta community for Beehaw. Ask your questions about the community, technical issues, and other such things here.

A brief FAQ for lurkers and new users can be found here.

Our September 2024 financial update is here.

For a refresher on our philosophy, see also What is Beehaw?, The spirit of the rules, and Beehaw is a Community


This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.


if you can see this, it's up  

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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
(page 2) 43 comments
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[–] NeccoNeko@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

It would be nice if I could donate via Apple Pay. Any plans for supporting that? Open Collective doesn't appear to support it.

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[–] dax@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I feel like those of us who have contributed should receive in return an adorable cat gif.

Not like, to display or anything. Just something happy that bounces in our mailboxes after we contribute. Maybe the cat is wearing a hat! Or maybe the cat has gotten into a humorous predicament. Or maybe the cat is riding a dog. Or a human! The possibilities are endless, the joy boundless; and pragmatically speaking, it makes our monthly receipts for donation slide ride on through with less risk of begrudging it :D

I am not a business cat and you should not take this as business advice

[–] uberrice@feddit.de 5 points 1 year ago

Ljdawson does this with his sync app - if you buy premium you get a nice little notification

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[–] Versacesquatch@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

I love this website and the transparency, sustainability and support. Super nice.

[–] marx2k@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] Lionir@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

Yes but merch is a lot of work to do in an ethical way. We also would prefer to pay the people designing the merch than ourselves so it's not something we'd consider using for fundraising.

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