Recently beehaw has been hung out to dry with Open Collective dissolving their Foundation which was their hosted collective. Basically, the company that was holding onto all of beehaw’s money, will no longer accept donations, and will close. You can read more in their alarmingly titled post: EMERGENCY ANNOUNCEMENT: Open Collective Foundation is dissolving, and Beehaw needs your help
While this does not affect us, it certainly could have been us. I hope the Beehaw admins are doing okay and manage to get their money back. From what I’ve seen it should be easy to zero-out your collective, but “closure” and “no longer taking donations” make for a stressful time.

Again, Reddthat isn’t affected by this but it does point out that we are currently at the behest of one company (person?) from winning the powerball or just running away with the donations.

Fees

Upon investigating our financials we are actually getting stung on fees quite often. Forgive me if I go on a rant here, skip below for the donation links if you don’t want to read about the ins and outs. OpenCollective uses Stripe, which take 3% + $0.30 per transaction. Thats pretty much an industry standard. 3% + 0.30. Occasionally it’s 3% + 0.25 depending on the payment provider Stripe uses internally. What I didn’t realise is that Open Collective also pre-fills the donation form. This defaults to 15.00%. So in reality when I have set the donation to be $10, you end up paying $11.50. $1.50 goes to Open Collective, and then Stripe takes $0.48 in transaction fees. Then, when I get reimbursed for the server payments, Stripe takes another payment fee, because our Hosted Collective also has to pay a transfer fee. (Between you and me, I’m not sure why that is when we are both in Australia… and inter-bank transactions are free). So of that $11.50 out of your pocket, $1.50 goes to Open Collective, Stripe takes $0.48, then at the end of the month I lose $0.56 per expense! We have 11 donators so and 3 expenses per month, which works out to be another $0.15 per donator. So at the end of the day, that $11.50 becomes $9.37. A total difference of $2.13 per donator per month.

As I was being completely transparent I broke these down to 3 different transactions. The Server, the extra ram, and our object storage. Clearly I can save $1.12/m by bundling all the transactions, but that is not ideal. In the past 3 months we have paid $26.83 in payment transaction fees.

After learning this information, anyone who has recurring donations setup should check if the would like to continue giving 15% to Open Collective or not, or pass that extra 15% straight to Reddthat instead!

So to help with this outcome we are going to start diversifying and promoting alternatives to Open Collective as well as attempting to publish, maybe a specific page which I can update like /donate. But for the moment we will update our sidebar and main funding page.

Donation Links

From now on we will be using the following services.

• Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/reddthat
  • (best for once off donations)
  • 0% on once-off donations
  • 5% on all recurring (Unless I pay them $8/month for 0% fee)
• Open Collective: https://opencollective.com/reddthat
  • (best for recurring donations)
  • Stripe 3% + $0.3 (+ $0.58 Expense fee/month)
• Crypto:
  • Donate Crypto (Trocador)
  • Donate Crypto (Trocador Onion)
• XMR Directly: 4286pC9NxdyTo5Y3Z9Yr9NN1PoRUE3aXnBMW5TeKuSzPHh6eYB6HTZk7W9wmAfPqJR1j684WNRkcHiP9TwhvMoBrUD9PSt3
• BTC Directly: bc1q8md5gfdr55rn9zh3a30n6vtlktxgg5w4stvvas

I’m looking into Librepay as well but it looks like I will need to setup stripe myself, if I can do that in a safe way (for me and you) then I’ll add that too.

Next Steps

From now on I’ll be bundling all expenses for the month into one “Expense” on Open Collective to minimise fees as that is where most of the current funding is. I’ll also do my best to do a quarterly budget report with expenditures and a sum of any OpenCollective/Kofi/Crypto/etc we have.

Thank you all for sticking around!

Tiff