Expenses Overview - Help by donating

#1

Donations are welcome! Many thanks to everyone who has contributed so far - it really does help!

Click here to donate now!

Current funds: ~$148 (108€)
Projected costs for June: ~$104 (76€)

June

May

Notes

  • All dollars represent USD.
  • Backups not included (these cost around a couple of dollars but vary).
  • We have a physical mailbox in Canada, the price of which hasn’t been included (but will be once I know how much it is, as one of our members is paying for it out of their own pocket).
  • If you’re planning on donating, please keep in mind that PayPal can take up to 5-6% (including credit card fees). If we reach a significant volume of donations per month, then we can completely get rid of transaction fees by using a service that charges a fixed monthly fee (that service only becomes worthwhile at $1000+ per month though).

We can significantly reduce costs on a couple of servers by reserving them for $60-$120 upfront for the year each. For more details on this, take a look at: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html (we have 2 servers that are m1.small).

If we can, we’ll do this. We’re also looking at options other than AWS.

Click here to donate now!

Please post below if you have any questions or send me a private message. If you’re going to make a LARGE donation, e.g. $250+, definitely contact me because we’re not using a PayPal business account, i.e. there are limits to how much can be received per year (until we upgrade).

Our ideal situation is to have recurring donations, for example, of $5-$10 a month per person. This helps us to plan ahead and make sure we can cover our expenses. Please consider this option if you have the cash to spare (one way to look at it is $0.16 to $0.32 a day).

Thank you.

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#2
#5

Updated with June expenses.

#6

I need to update this but we’ve depleted all donations at the moment. What this means is that 2 people have to pay for most of the costs, which can become quite hefty over the time. So if you have a couple of bucks to spare, please consider donating to help fund the costs of the servers.

Even $1 helps!

#7

Since the site is down right now, I tried donating to help with the upkeep costs - but alas, the donation page is down as well! I think I could help with the costs with, say, 20€ a month? 10€ on the first and sixteenth day of each month.

And would it be possible to make all the costs involved in running the site public and visible in any kind of a verifiable manner? It would fit the overall theme of accountability very well, no? :wink: If you could do that I would think about partly sponsoring a more cost-efficient server setup.

The cable connection I have at my apartment on behalf of the housing co-op apparently also has a 12mbit upload with no data limit. However, I’ve got basically zero experience in regards to running a dedicated server machine but I’ve got a couple of friends in IT engineering that might be of help, should you be interested.

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#8

Hi Volmer, that’d be fantastic and would definitely help.

That’s what we want to do but it’s a bit hard at the moment because we have things spread out and are working on consolidating. For example, I pay directly for MeritocracyNow.net and Community.MeritocracyNow.net plus a couple of other meritocracy sites. Someone else pays for MP.org and Meritopedia.org, but is working on transferring them over to me to make things easier.

The paypal account is a personal account, so taking screenshots of it means there’d be personal transactions in there. These could be blacked out of course, but that makes it 90% transparency. Which I guess can be good enough for the time being until we figure out a better solution … do you have any ideas?

All of this will become easier once we have a legal entity that can have its own hosting accounts, its own bank accounts, its own business paypal account, etc … that would enable finances to be 100% transparent.

Another thing to do would be to post the invoices we get from the hosting companies but those are easy to forge and also I don’t think there’s going to be trust issues in regards to expenses. There’s more likely to be trust issues, if any, with how much money is received, whether it’s being reported accurately, and so on.

Regarding running on a dedicated machine, thanks but I think at the moment we’re sticking with cloud solutions because of the scalability they bring. It’s extremely easy to scale up: and we want to scale up because it means we’re getting thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of visits when we do :).

#9

Also to donate / send money, the Paypal account is themeritocracyparty …at… gmail …dot… com (this is what you’ll see when you click on the Donate button on the website when it’s back up. Or should see, I’m not entirely sure now).

#10

Thanks, I’ll try to remember to start my cashflow for the cause tomorrow! And just the fact that you’d be willing to put the paypal information up (with some redactions) means a lot. I’ll consider that proof enough for the time being.

1 Like
#11

Great, thank you!

#12

Or rather, once Paypal wants to co-operate again… Sigh. I’ll work on it!