We’ve been adulting pretty hard (is that what real adults say?) as our project grows and multiple contributors have been taking on some personal expenses to support this project. While some companies have been gracious in donating their services to us, there has been some real cost in maintaining Meshtastic.
Running servers, software licenses, code signing certificates, development systems and equipment don’t run cheap. We’ve been very lucky up to now that a small number of very kind individuals have been holding us up, but it’s not fair for that to go on forever.
Over the last week, we have partnered with both the Open Collective and the Open Source Collective to help us with a fiscal management framework and banking needs. They help support over three thousand open source projects including the PHP Foundation, F-Droid, Sonarr, LinuxServer and DarkReader. We are in good hands and good company.
As with everything we do here, Open Collective provides a fully transparent framework for our budget and expenses. You can see what we’re bringing in, who is spending money and where that money is going.
Check them out at our Open Collective landing page where you can make a donation using multiple options including crypto: Meshtastic - Open Collective
In addition to our partnership with Open Collective and Open Source Collective, we have also been approved into the GitHub Sponsor program where we can set fundraising goals with GitHub. Check them out too: Sponsor @meshtastic on GitHub Sponsors · GitHub
All donations made through GitHub will be deposited to our account with the Open Source Collective and managed by the Open Collective. This means we have a single place to monitor and maintain transparency of our finances.
We do have some pretty awesome plans coming up and you are part of our team! Thanks for being so awesome!
I appreciate what you all are doing, and I’d like to donate. Of the options listed above, is one better to use to make a private donation (for example, less service fees)? I know some funding companies take a hefty fee from each donation, so I’d like to use the one that works out best for you.
GitHub doesn’t charge fees for tracking the donations. We have them pass 100% of any GitHub donations into our account with Open Source Collective as the OSC has the relationship with the payment processor. In the end, the only fees are handled by Open Source Collective/Open Collective and they have a single and combined flat 10% of what comes in.
For what they provide, 10% is actually really good since they also absorb all payment processor fees, their cut is only about 7%. With that 7%, they provide a lot of services, payment handling, expense processing, banking, debit cards (we have not taken this option) and a legal framework for us to operate under a 501(c)4.
Operating under their 501(c)4 means that members of this project don’t have any personal income tax liabilities for the money that we have to handle.
We did evaluate other fiscal sponsors. For the size of Meshtastic, the OSC and OC was the easiest to work with and also aligned with the transparency we value.
If you want to contact someone directly and offer them a few bucks either as a direct offer or a request for custom work, that would be between you and that other person.
BAT token was mentioned, if the community is interested I can help implement Brave rewards for Publishers on this site and others. Sounds like the tokens could be sent directly to the OSC account.
