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
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would rather see ads or something than having someone work that hard for no pay to keep it going. Have you thought about other potential revenue streams, or would you like to workshop or discuss options?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One idea that I believe could use some discussion is Beehaw merchandise.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I would be delighted to wear a Beehaw shirt out and about, and I'd love a Beehaw sticker for my laptop. I am happy to contribute labor to making these things happen - please let me know if I can assist in any way. My design skills are mediocre, but I am capable of taking an existing thing and turning it into a format that works for various applications, and I'm familiar with setting up basic online storefronts for print-on-demand etc.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

An official Beehaw merchandise online store would be something that would require talks with all the admins with voting power. That would be my self, Gaywallet, Lionir and Alyaza. You could begin by creating a post about this in c/chat and pinging all of us there.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I would also happily donate some design labour towards Beehaw merchandise.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Do you haz a sad?