Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:

As promised, I figured I'd give an update regarding the forums finances and where we are at. I want to be open about such things - the money we make is to be managed by me on behalf of the community, rather than funding my own lifestyle, and as such there is no reason for me to keep these numbers private.

Income:
October 22nd - October 31st, 2020:
Raw store revenue: $8,401.55
Processing fees: -$509.30
Hosting cost: -$1,127.33

November 2020:
Raw store revenue: $7,903.01
Processing fees: -$635.22
Hosting cost: -$1,126.40

December 2020:
Raw Store Revenue: $5,549.14
Processing fees: -$463.28
Hosting cost -$1,138.45

Credit card processing fees are pretty harsh. Hosting costs remain relatively stable for now, but in the next year, costs will go up. We have some modernization projects that are going to require spinning up new servers and migrating to them, and, in the interim period, both new servers and old servers will co-exist. In addition, some of these new costs will be permanent and represent things that provide new functionality or development resources. It's wild that we don't have a dev database instance and I plan on keeping one around.

Other costs we will incur include bills for legal and accounting services. These will be for the purpose of keeping the business in good legal standing and are 100% unrelated to the initial transaction with lowtax - I gave my word that forums store purchases wouldn't go to him or making a deal with him, and I meant it. I have kept a strict separation between forums finances and my personal finances and that is how it will stay.

I would like to congratulate Skyl3lazer for spending the most the first month - he will get to permaban lowtax! He spent enough to pay for an entire month of hosting costs, super cool.

I think this has the potential to be a really good year for something awful. I intend to be proactive in growing this place, be it be enticing old users to return or attracting new ones, and I intend to do so without compromising the culture here. I think old-style internet forums are the best way to communicate online and I think a lot of people who have never posted on a forum would use them if they knew they were there.

Forums tech has been progressing nicely. I am still in the process of doing the legal legwork to hire Astral (it is more onerous than I ever realized to do this right.) We have some big improvements planned even if many of them are under the hood. There is a tech forum now that I expect will get much more active over the coming year as more stuff changes.

Overall, while we are covering our costs just fine, I could use more money for development work. I am not going to pretend that we're on our last legs, or struggling to pay hosting costs. That said, I am going to spend money on modernizing the software and software process around here. Developer hours are expensive and there is a lot of work to be done to modernize this place. It would be nice to have some sort stable base of revenue that doesn't so much depend on people making purchases each month. I am considering starting a patreon for this reason - recurring donations are difficult to implement in the store software we have, and it would be nice for planning purposes to be fairly certain we're gonna get at least $X/month. Please let me know what you think of this - my impression from the emails I've received is that a number of people are willing to contribute each month, and they currently don't have a way to do that.

I still don't have an update on the front page. There has been so much to do for the forums themselves that it's hard to even start thinking about the frontpage. I managed to get lowtax's name off of it, eventually.