Plaintextaccounting project finance, and how you can help

Site
1

G'day all!

The plaintextaccounting github organisation is a place to collect funds to support general PTA resources like plaintextaccounting.org, forum.plaintextaccounting.org, reddit.com/r/plaintextaccounting and the plaintextaccounting matrix and IRC chat rooms.

You can find financial reports, and donate links, on the plaintextaccounting Finance page: https://plaintextaccounting.org/finance

That page tells:

  • How you can donate or sponsor
  • How the money is used
  • The history and current state of the plaintextaccounting organisation's finances.

The reports are up to date, and going forward I'll update them at the start of each month.

As you can see, our main expense is professional Discourse hosting. I think this provides a lot of value and is cost effective (see past discussion). We're not yet covering that cost, but I think we easily can do so, which would make us a solvent, self-supporting community. At least in regard to the plaintextaccounting site and forum.

You can help by becoming an individual or business sponsor of the plaintextaccounting org!

[A slight clarification: this post and the plaintextaccounting Finance page are about general plain text accounting resources, which usually have "plaintextaccounting" or "pta" in their name.
The plaintextaccounting github org also serves as a home for some projects which have their own separate finances (eg, hledger recently moved there).]

2

Just looking at the hosting costs. Would it be more cost effective if discourse was self hosted or if it is a more cost effective host? A $50 /month run rate is quite high for a small community.

I wouldn't mind helping if this this is something you're interesting in.

3

Thanks for your support @apearson. I looked into those options in the past discussion linked above. I still think Discourse hosting is the right call, for stability, performance, and freeing up time better spent elsewhere.

4

Simon Michael notifications@plaintextaccounting.discoursemail.com
writes:

Thanks for your support @apearson. I looked into those options in the
past discussion linked above. I still think Discourse hosting is the
right call, for stability, performance, and freeing up time better
spent elsewhere.

I think it's also worth to note that those 50$ include the time spend on
maintaining the discourse instance.
That's something that would go on top of the self hosting costs.

5

Exactly. I for one have too many services I can't afford to maintain well; the FOSS projects I interact with who self-manage their services are always mired in infrastructure debt; and it's getting much harder to maintain uptime and security, month by month.