Donations

Apparently this works:
https://paypal.me/lfgss

Which I only discovered when PayPal updated their mobile app and it spurred me to finally change the PayPal account name from "Buro 9 Limited" (long defunct) to "LFGSS". So hey, it looks better on your PayPal screen now.

Did a donation via PP on a mobile just now and it does reference LFGSS. However PP didn't redirect me back to the site.

Just an fyi really.

Oh, using the paypal.me link?

I'll see if that's configurable anywhere.

No, via the donate here button under About top right

Had a look, cannot be configured apparently.

And the better link, the https://paypal.me/lfgss/10 type link... that cannot do the recurring payment thing.

So we have to stick with the ugly and who knows where you end up.

An update on costs.

tl;dr I was worried for a while that with a few of the annual costs due this month that perhaps our cashflow wasn't healthy, but we're good for now.

This month we've got a few of the heftier costs, wildcard SSL cert for the various domains that help us proxy and cache attachments images as well as serve our API. This is a couple of hundred dollars.

Our email costs seem to be higher than I though too, so I figured it was time to do a boring thing and sit down and work out all costs we face over a year and then to work out the monthly rate from that and figure out whether we're doing OK or not.

The answer is yes, we're still good.

Each year, our total costs are (approx GBP value based on 2016-04-01 USD exchange rate, our bills are exclusively in USD):

£6,337.51

Each month this is:

£528.13

(if this is higher than any figure I previously quoted, I probably wasn't so diligent on tracking the annual costs such as email (some of it is paid annually), domain names, SSL and some of the email costs).

This breaks down (monthly) as:

49.5% Hosting fees: £261.35 (inc' Linode + backups, Tarsnap backups, AWS S3 storage and bandwidth)
28.9% Email fees: £152.74 (inc' Mailgun 50k emails + IP, Mailjet 50k emails + IP, Dmarcian, Google Apps)
14.7% Domain names: £77.79 (inc' all LFGSS domains, and the .sm for Microcosm which is a 1/3 of all domain costs)
4.7% Miscellany: £24.69 (inc' Github and continuous integration fees)
2.2% SSL: £11.55 (RapidSSL wildcard cert)

We currently serve around 270k unique users per month, and are shifting ~600GB traffic from Linode and an additional ~980GB of cached content from CloudFlare.

Which means I can figure out that it costs approx 1p to serve 152 web pages or 5 average visitors over the month.

It's all pretty damn cheap.

On to incomings.

Donations varies month-on-month, affiliate revenue varies month-on-month... costs are pretty stable.

Donations last month were high than normal and come out at £372.51. They were higher than normal because a couple of people made one-off donations above £10.

Affiliate fees last month were £136.82 (Affiliate Window) + £85.40 (Amazon) + £135.40 (eBay) = £357.62

That's an above average Affiliate Window figure which will increase as we head into Spring/Summer and peak around the TdF, it's a much higher Amazon figure (usually we don't get paid because it's way below the £20 threshold) and a predictable lower eBay figure (their decline continues, I expect it to reach zero in the next year or so).

Largely that total figure is kinda stable in the long-run, the slowdown on eBay has so far been made up by additions from Affiliate Window.

Basically wanted to put all that detail out there, show that yes donations do work and are critical. I can't predict affiliate revenue and sometimes it crashes through the floor and sometimes it spikes (like Amazon did this month).

Most months the donations + affiliates hover around the break even point, but sometimes we come out ahead and sometimes we're a bit behind, overall we do break even or come out fractionally ahead.

The extra this month is being sunk into the annualised costs, the SSL certs. Usually I leave it in the PayPal account and it accrues until bills suck it out. So this month we're going to come close to emptying the account, but it's fine... I'm confident that it's just the annualised costs spiking outgoings and not us being in a bad place. My credit card isn't being touched, except for the few providers who don't take PayPal.

Oh, email. We send a hell of a lot more than I thought. Around 1,500 per day on average but occasional spikes of 3-4k per day when something major occurs and more notifications go out. We're now signing all of these using something called DKIM. This is because a lot of spam was being sent in our name, and to stop that I'm now signing everything with DKIM and monitoring it using DMARC.

The changes in emails means that some users may find that they do not receive emails. I've noticed that Apple's servers are least compliant with regards to security, DKIM and DMARC... I've no idea if the emails get through. On Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail things look pretty good now, with all spam sent in our name being outright rejected leaving only the transactional emails we actually do send (via Mailgun) to get through.

That's the very long full transparency, every cost itemised dull update.

And before anyone suggests doing it cheap... we are extraordinarily cheap already for what we do. It may be possible to be cheaper with Google Cloud, but actually that would be to externalise a cost on me to re-write the whole thing for Google Cloud.

You rock, dude. Thanks for the update/writeup.

This is awesome. Thanks man. I just donated.

First post updated to provide a link to the PayPal "My pre-approved payments" page as it turns out PayPal allows people to set up more than one subscription at a time and someone was double-donating.

If you have a regular subscription, see the link in the first post of this thread and take a look at your PayPal.

Donations...

I'm afraid that I have to bang the drum on these again.

It wasn't an issue that the affiliates had declined because donations were stable enough and a few people had made larger, one-off donations this year and that made up for it and for a few months we seemed to be getting ahead of ourselves.

But... #brexit.

Every bill that LFGSS has is in USD, and it's clear looking at the charges appearing today for the hosting and email, that the exchange rate difference is not minor.

We've gone from "around break-even each month on average (some months up, some months down)" to "Oops, exchange rates mean we're going to be about £70 down this month and likely each month from now".

What this means is that the small spikes (like last month) that see us through the small dips (a few months ago) on average they even out... but they're not enough to make up the £70 down I now expect each month... the ups aren't up enough, and the dips are usually large.

Instead of one-off donations (even if large), it's much safer to use smaller more frequent donations from many people. This also spreads the burden to an insignificant amount... it's just "buy the forum a beer once a month"... or a cheap bottle of wine if that's your thing.

A fair few people who think that they are donating actually aren't... a lot of donations have expired over the past year or so.

If you get value out of the forum, consider setting up a £5 monthly donation.

It's easy to donate.

To set up a recurring monthly donation (recommended):

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=JVANL7DPKDK8U

To make a one-off donation (appreciated, but a smaller monthly one is better):

https://paypal.me/lfgss/10

If I can rebuild the regular and small donations, this will smooth out the finances and will protect against the currency exchange rates.

I also do have to build a mini war-chest, unfortunately the site is too busy... we're on the cusp of not being able to get some things for free (like the maps on the event pages). It looks like we have about 3-6 months before some of our costs rise as a result (depends on whether the Summer traffic levels are maintained after the Summer, or whether they decline a little).

Bossman

The donations button is not available when browsing on a phone.

I'll try to donate something when I get home today.

The links in the prior comment don't work?

tl;dr

Hah.

Well... thank you. This month is now covered.

Though it's still desirable to get many small recurring donations over the spikey larger one-off donations. So whilst incredibly appreciated I'm going to leave the donations appeal open.

It's the small monthly ones that long-term make a difference.

I wonder if you could save some of that money spent on email notifications somehow?
Maybe the default is to only send emails for PMs and a daily update on all subscribed threads?
And then a more fine-grained option to be enabled as and when?

It's being investigated... hence the email tracking I added last week. It doesn't track who gets what, or whether you read it... just whether you then click on a link that leads back to the site.

Currently, I'd say it really does look like a lot of people really do use them.

Which makes sense given they are so easy to disable.

Fair enough. I wonder if its still just because it's there. Cutting back might not actually draw too much complaint. It might even make people more productive :p

I guess also part of the problem is that the individual volume of emails to any one user is small, but the user base is large so it quickly grows out of hand

The biggest cost is actually the hosting.

I do wonder about that.

Google Cloud is way cheaper than even self-hosted Linode's, but to use it I'd have to re-write quite a lot of stuff people don't even see.

Meh. We serve 185k users, over 1 million sessions... all for £700 per month. Frankly it's a freaking bargain and it works brilliantly, stable, secure, fast, across devices, etc.

What I should do is concentrate more on making it pay for itself than always looking to the thing I know best (tech) and attempting instead just to reduce costs. Costs are pretty low, and we do a hell of a lot with what we have.

Maybe time for a condensed version of the Donations post to appear at the top of the Classified section for all to see and an email or PM to everyone who creates a new Classified thread asking them to consider a donation?

Can you differentiate between those who donate and are regular forum wide users and those who only use the form mainly for selling?

Can you differentiate between those who donate and are regular forum wide users and those who only use the form mainly for selling?

I haven't built that. I could build it.

The hard bit is that not everyone uses the same email for PayPal and their personal account (I sure as hell don't).

This would definitely solve things... if to advertise more than once you needed to make a donation.

Flat fee (50p) for For Sale posts?

That was what I was working towards eventually :) but I just wondered if that would reduce the volume of sales threads (mainly from those who login to sell only) and whether that would then have a knock on affect on the forum generally.

Closing this donations thread... it's old and long and a lot of early information is out of date.

A new one is here: https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/289326/

At the worst LFGSS cost triple what it does today, for far less traffic. Microcosm changed that, but donations and affiliates revenue are both far lower than they used to be too.

What I'll do is attempt to rebuild a core of regular small donors, in addition to the approx' 100 donors we have today.

If we can get that to a few hundred donors... we'll be fine. Until then the one-off larger donations are appreciated and see us through the occasional shortfall.