Financial update. Sorry for the delay. My goal in posting these updates is threefold:
- To give community members an idea of where the money comes from, and where it goes.
- To give contributors (and everyone, I guess) comfort that the money is being handled responsibly.
- To give future treasurers a roadmap so that they can easily jump into this role. (Which is truly not that complicated.)
Expenses:
This is easy:
- We’re currently running $45/month on Digital Ocean for hosting fees. I am paying this monthly fee directly from my personal credit card. At some point, if someone else takes over as treasurer, they will have to create an account with Digital Ocean that autopays.
- @simplicitus owns the domain and pays for that fee. He has not asked to be reimbursed.
- @jmakin recently mentioned something about paying for some mailing feature. I don’t know anything about that.
Incoming money:
- The primary source of funds is Patreon, where the Unstuck Politics account has 22 active patrons and brings in roughly $120 month (with some variation). The administrator of that account (currently me) can easily see the monthly earnings since 2019 here: https://www.patreon.com/dashboard/earnings. You can also download a .csv file showing donations by member, but it’s a little messy to reconcile that detail to the monthly earnings number.
- We occasionally get donations through paypal (PayPal.Me). This happens maybe once a month. These donations land directly in my personal paypal account; we do not have a separate Unstuck Paypal account.
- For a time, there was theoretical advertising money being earned with google, but actually obtaining that money has proved to be impossible. (This appears to be very common on Google.) We have $500 Canadian dollars on Google AdSense, but no ability to withdraw it. (I have again logged in to verify that it’s there right now in limbo.) So this is pretend money that will never be realized. If we are magically able to extract it, we can buy shares of GME or Top Shot moments or whatever.
- We have recently been added to Brave Rewards. The idea is that if you use the Brave browser, your browsing activity generates tokens for you to donate to websites of your choice. We currently have 19.00 BAT in our Brave Rewards account. I think I can somehow convert that to Bitcoin, but I don’t yet have an account to do so.
Current balances:
Patreon: $2,148.96
Paypal: -$7.88
Total: $2,141.08
(The negative paypal balance means that I’ve paid a bunch of money out of my personal accounts to reimburse ggoreo and zikzak, as well as for monthly hosting fees for the past several months. And I haven’t actually been reimbursed yet - every dollar that’s ever been added to Patreon is still there. I’m just keeping track of how much UP owes me. If I wanted to be made whole right now, I’d transfer $7.88 from Patreon to my personal account. When a new treasurer takes over, I’ll just zero out the paypal balance and they’ll start with just Patreon.)
So that’s it. Going forward, I’ll probably just give smaller updates with just the numbers. But I did want there to be a record of what the treasurer actually does and where the information comes from. Also, it’s important to note that I make absolutely no decisions about what to spend money on, whether to run ads, etc. I just process money based on the decisions of the community.
As always, thanks to all of you who have donated - it’s very generous of you. I enjoy this community and I’m glad to play a small part in keeping it running. And echoing a recent comment from @jmakin, I think the best donation you can make is to recruit more smart/funny/interesting people to join the community.
Sorry for those of you looking for a Skyline Chili update. I still have money left on the gift card that was donated, and I will likely make my second trip there to celebrate my vaccine shot (for which I am not yet eligible).