Notes on the Future of theATL.social: Financial Stability
TL;DR:
- Thank you, donors! ❤️
- Contributions need to match expenses - goal of August 31, 2023
- $2 per active user (per month) brings us to sustainability.
- All expenses now posted to OpenCollective
- OpenCollective is requested for use for future donations.
First, I want to acknowledge the donors who collectively have contributed nearly $500 via Patreon since theATL.social was established. Those donations have directly supported the operations of the instance. Thank you! 🤗
However, theATL.social has been running at a loss since the site was established. While this cost was sustainable in the short term, as we’ve reached the six-month anniversary of the instance, a pathway toward financial stability needs to be established.
Currently, expenses are at ~$200/month, and donations are running $74/month.
The good news: small donations can easily help achieve financial stability with our current active user count. With our current approx. 120 active users, only $2 per user would completely cover costs. (The $2 reflects an additional amount needed to cover taxes on contributions.)
The bad news: if financial stability is not achieved or is otherwise impossible, then it is inevitable that operations of theATL.social would need to be transferred or, as the absolute last resort, wound down.
With this request also comes transparency: starting this June, all invoices for theATL.social costs are now posted to OpenCollective. All future invoices will also be posted to OpenCollective - and through that site, contributions may be collected.
➡️ If theATL.social users have ideas, opportunities, discounts, or questions about the items in the invoices, please feel free to ask in yall.theatl.social!
(Current Patreon donors may continue their donations on that site; however, OpenCollective provides a lower-cost fee structure, as compared to Patreon.)
With a goal of reaching financial sustainability by August 31, 2023 - your contributions to help reach this goal are greatly appreciated.
Over the next 60 days, I’ll keep our subscriber and monthly donation count up-to-date as we reach our Aug 31 goal!
Up next in the next note: next steps on the legal structure for theATL.social.
I would add that the $200/mo is the cost of the servers and various backend services that doesn’t include Michael’s tireless labor which is quite valuable and we are lucky to have him running everything. Thank you Michael! 🙏
Aww, that is very kind of you to say! I’m so glad that a little hobby project has turned into so much more!
Holy crap $2 per user was higher than I expected. I guess that goes down as we get more users though?
Long-story-short, yes, there are economies of scale.
For example, the current Cloudflare, Sendgrid, and Docker tiers are sufficient up to a few thousand users.
On the virtual server side on DigitalOcean, I’ve done my best to use the minimum tier of servers that allow for most spikes in traffic, and to separate mastodon services onto separate servers to provide resiliency if one service fails, and scalability if one service needs to be scaled up or down. When all the services were combined onto 1-2 servers when I started things, keeping uptime stats good - and doing maintenance- were quite tough.
I’m also glad to chat more about the infrastructure, and am open to any suggestions on how to achieve additional cost efficiencies.
One more note: there’s also the taxes issue because contributions are currently counted as my personal income, which reduces the net amount of funds I can use for operations.
I am looking towards placing theATL.social under a legal structure (more on this in the next note) for a more advantageous tax treatment of contributions, and the ability to segregate funds received into a separate business bank account.
