I made a small donation, and if you like it here, I think you should (if you can) too.
I am one of many that have sought out alternatives to Reddit. I really like the feel of how this community works. I’ve not seen them push the need for support, but I’m sure they’re feeling it. It’s clear they’ve made changes in the past couple of days to help support the growth & load.
That said, servers and bandwidth aren’t free, and they’ve seen a massive wave of influx.
Sidebar says: “Our instance is 100% user-funded - help us keep it running by donating.”
Click here for the Donate Link
Here’s the Open Collective Page with more info.
I’m not affiliated with Beehaw in any way other than being part of the exodus from Reddit, and I like it here.
*This is my first actual non-comment post, so here’s hoping I didn’t mess this up.
I’m just waiting for my next paycheck to hit!
It’s a breath of fresh air here. I’m days old and have no desire to turn back. I’m not lurking anymore after 12+ years. And it feels human, despite being a digital platform.The investment seems like a risk worth taking honestly. (as long as they stay transparent) Let’s keep it up, yeah?
Side note: I remember a questionnaire for brave browser maybe? About their BAT pay system for publishers/ devs to sustain their ecosystems. And I settled on $2 a month being fair for an ad-free/ hassle-free experience, granted the content was worth it. This feels entirely worth it. And I don’t have to deal with fucking tokens.
To anyone looking to donate here is a financial thread made by the admins for this month where they outline where money is going and how much is spent roughly each month (it is a few days old however and donations have increased since then so i would keep that in mind) https://beehaw.org/post/428209
I dropped a donation over the weekend, I had a blast here this weekend and really am looking forward to growing this community into something new.
Have the admins described how Beehaw is deployed? Do they use VPS with predictable pricing and they’re vertically scaling the servers? Or do they have horizontal scaling and the prices are rising in accordance to demand? Predictable monthly pricing will make it much easier to budget donations.
Yeah it would be cool if they could breakdown what the cost per user per month is, I’d be willing to pay for myself and a few others regularly
The last update I saw said the server cost is something like $55 per month and there is $600 or so in reserves. The updates are usually in Beehaw Support community
Edit: sorry for all the repeated posts, y’all! I was having trouble posting and then suddenly it all worked
https://beehaw.org/post/428209
It’s a week old and not super detailed, but it looks like they’re on Digital Ocean, but might be looking to move to a cheaper service. Based off of how I’ve seen the site struggle I don’t think they have any horizontal scaling.
Thanks for the push - just put in my first donation and will set up a recurring one after my next paycheck. Trying to do my part by 1) being active(ish) in the community and 2) monetarily
I’ve just thrown in. I hope to see this community thrive and bring others up with it!
Just started a monthly payment, hoping this lasts for a while. Thanks for everyone involved in upkeeping this community :)
Chipped in a bit myself, regardless of the fact I’m self hosting. I really like what I’ve seen on Beehaw so far, and the admin teams communication has been stellar. Happy for it to become the “large instance” I interact with most!
I’m in, just set up a small monthly donation.
I’ve done my part
If my interest in this platform continues, I’ll be making it a monthly thing.
I think the admins here are doing great, and they deserve the support from me given how much I’m using it lately
I’m not even on this instance and still donate a small sum monthly on opencollective. Really like the Beehaw community.
I’ve thrown in about $40 total since I joined. I should do monthly but I’m trying to cut down on subscriptions since I have a bad habit of signing up for a bunch and forgetting to cancel. I’ll try to make sure I actively donate regularly though as long as I’m using the instance. I appreciate the effort the admins have gone into making this instance and I want to do my part to help ease potential stress on the financial side at least
Where can we find expense information? I just donated but I would love to see transparent financial data. Maybe it’s already out there I just couldn’t find it…
Edit: thanks for the input. I’ve found a couple of updates and detailed receipts on the donation site itself.
On the open collective, you can see all the expenses we pay. Worth noting that the current upgrades to hosting this month are not account for.
This month we expect our hosting costs to be between 96$ and 336$ because we’re being prorated on Digital Ocean and trying to scale to keep the site running smooth.
Thanks for the response! Glad to be supporting the community. Thanks for all you do.
There are frequent updates in https://beehaw.org/c/support
There are some excellent updates on finances posted by the mods. They do a very good job of keeping us informed. When I started Beehaw’s server was $12 or so per month. Moving up to the $18 or so per month version was a big deal. With the influx from Rexxit they’ve expanded the server something like 7 times, and are now at the $55 or so per month level. Last I remember, they said we have $600 or so in reserves, so Beehaw is sitting pretty for a few months.
I would assume the influx will continue and the server will need to increase again.
I donated the other day and I’m glad to see the user base here so willing to support the project!
If we want these places to succeed, we need to be willing to pay for them. It’s the only way to keep things running ad and data collection free.
I would have been happy paying Reddit to keep 3rd party app access… But they clearly think my data is worth more than a direct monthly fee. So I’ll give them neither and hang out here instead.
Even if we were willing to pay the API fee at 20x the estimated per-user revenue, they wanted to gut the content available by killing NSFW. I understand porn is politically/legally challenging at this time, fine exclude that. Now consider how much more content would be excluded from a paying user. There’s a LOT flagged as NSFW on reddit that has nothing to do with porn.