oh man that 5% rake feels like straight up marxism.
So how does this work, anyway?
i use their browser, which blocks some ads and most trackers, and also has a builtin vpn (which i don’t use) if you care about that.
in exchange they show me a discrete notification once an hour telling me to buy crypto or something. they skim some off the top, and then give me the ad revenue as non-cashable tokens, which i then send to verified creators of my own choosing.
so i have monthly contributions to wikipedia, and another charity, and now unstuck. i can also “tip” developers on github with the tokens.
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Awesome! Thanks
looks like they skim the donation too. i’d be curious to see how much that raises for unstuck
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).
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We use a mail service called mailgun. It’s very good and only costs us pennies per month. I picked up the tab.
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Almost 4 years of runway, hot damn.
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Finally, a financial update. The post I’m replying to has a good summary of the process I go through and where the money is. Nothing has really changed from that summary, other than losing a couple of monthly donations, so I’m not going to copy it here.
Expenses: I’m still paying $45 a month to Digital Ocean for hosting fees.
Incoming money:
- Patreon is bringing in about $110 a month with a little variation. Every dollar that’s ever been donated via Patreon is still on Unstuck’s account. I haven’t withdrawn anything. (This will need to change.)
- There haven’t been any recent donations to Paypal.
Current balances:
Patreon: $2,385.28
Paypal: -$97.88 (this means that UP owes me $97.88 for the cumulative payments I’ve made, but not been reimbursed for. This is why I said earlier I’ll need to start withdrawing some money from Patreon. I mean, it’s not a huge amount, but the treasurer–whether it’s me or someone else–shouldn’t be owed money by the site.)
Total: $2,287.40
We have 20.90 Brave Rewards (BAT), but I still don’t have any idea what they are, and I don’t yet have a crypto wallet to link to them. Should probably set that up now to take advantage of the DIP.
As always, thanks to everyone who is donating or has donated.
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Are you in charge of the patreon? Just pay yourself and note it here
Yes, I have control over the Patreon and my plan is to withdraw money from that account and note that process in these updates. I just haven’t gone through the effort to connect my bank account to it in order to enable those withdrawals. It really isn’t something that’s bothering me, though, just something that I want to make clear for anyone who’s keeping track.
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A financial update. You can find a detailed description of how I keep track of things here. Nothing much is different, other than we’ve continue to drop a bit on the donation front. (This isn’t a complaint, just a statement of fact.) The hosting continues to run $45/month, which I pay on my personal credit card, and donations continue to be above that amount. If we need to upgrade to $80/month (which jmakin suggested at some point in the past, but I don’t know enough to know whether that’s necessary), we’ll be just about at breakeven:
- Every dollar that’s ever been donated via Patreon is still on Unstuck’s account - I haven’t withdrawn anything. (I keep saying that this will change so that I can be reimbursed for what I’ve spent. But I’ve been too lazy to do that so far.)
- No recent donations via Paypal.
Current balances:
Patreon: $2,576.43
Paypal: -$187.88 (this means that UP owes me $187.88, which at some point I will withdraw from Patreon. I just haven’t done it yet.)
Total: $2,388.55
Thanks for everyone who is donating or has donated.
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It’s been way too long since I’ve updated things. Sorry for the break.
Detailed description of how I keep track of things here.
-
We have continued to drop on the donation front. We are still slightly over the monthly hosting fee, but not by much ($66 incoming donations vs. $49 hosting fee; the hosting fee has increased from $45 because Digital Ocean has finally starting charging sales tax on the monthly amount.)
-
Every dollar that’s ever been donated via Patreon is still on Unstuck’s account - I haven’t withdrawn anything. (I continue to pay hosting fees on my credit card, but I also continue to be too lazy to actually set up the transfer from Patreon to reimburse what I’ve spent.)
-
No recent donations via Paypal.
Current balances:
Patreon: $2,899.69
Paypal: -$394.74 (this means that UP owes me $394.74, which at some point I will withdraw from Patreon.)
Total: $2,504.95
Thanks to everyone who is donating or has donated.
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So… if we never got another donation there are enough donations to run for 4.25 years? I think we should encourage donators to stop donating.
I’m hesitant to encourage people to stop donating, but that’s mainly because I’m incredibly conservative and don’t like to think about the idea of the site going under. But your point is valid (and your math is obviously correct). I think it’s a big part of why it’s important to post regular updates - to let donors and potential donors know exactly what our financial status is, so they can make an informed judgment about whether they should continue/start donating.
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Thanks for your updates, and I agree with you. I stopped donations a few months back only because it looks like we’re flush with money. If that changes, I’ll start up again.
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I was expecting chili dogs
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Another belated update.
Detailed description of how I keep track of things here.
- Donations are stable and slightly over the monthly hosting fee, ($70 incoming donations vs. $49 hosting fee)
- No recent donations via Paypal.
- Every dollar that’s ever been donated via Patreon is still on Unstuck’s account - I haven’t withdrawn anything. BUT THIS IS CHANGING. I finally set up my information with Patreon so that I can get reimbursed for the hosting fees that I’ve been paying (since late 2020). The Patreon account is frozen for a few days (as they do to an account any time a new payout method is added), but once that freeze is up I plan on making a withdrawal.
Current balances:
Patreon: $3,116.30
Paypal: -$539.88 (this means that UP owes me $539.88, which is the amount I plan to withdraw from Patreon)
Total: $2,576.42
Thanks to everyone who is donating or has donated.
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Another belated update, with a bit of a wrinkle.
Detailed description of how I keep track of things here.
- Donations are have dipped a little, but still slightly over the monthly hosting fee, ($59 incoming donations vs. $49 hosting fee)
- No recent donations via Paypal.
- Every dollar that’s ever been donated via Patreon is still on Unstuck’s account - I haven’t withdrawn anything. This is where the wrinkle comes in. I had planned to withdraw enough money from Patreon to cover what I’ve put in so far. And I even connected my checking account successfully. But apparenly you cannot make a partial withdrawal.
Current balances:
Patreon: $3,307.88
Paypal: -$685.02 (this means that UP owes me $685.02, which is the amount I would have withdrawan from Patreon if partial withdrawals were allowed)
Total: $2,622.86
So I have two choices, neither of which seem very good to me:
- Continue funding UP each month and let the IOU continue to grow until some undefined date where I finally decide to withdraw?
- Withdraw the full $3,307.88 balance, even though that’s enormously more than what I’m actually owed. That would leave me holding $2,622.86 of UP’s money in my own personal accounts, which would slowly be bled down with the monthly payments I make.
Like I said, I don’t love either option. Any thoughts? Maybe someone just ship me one of those fancy monkey pictures and we call it even?
Thanks to everyone who is donating or has donated.
Withdraw the full amount, keep what you’re owed, and donate back the remainder? Are there fees in that scenario?