💵 Financial report (2025-01)

[ldez]

Open Collective is the fiscal host for golangci-lint.

The GitHub Sponsors are transferred automatically to Open Collective about the 22nd of each month (Open Collective receives them about the 26th).
All donations after the 22nd are transferred the next month.
I don't control this date.
The first recurring donation or recurring donation changes can be prorated depending on the billing cycle: for example, a $2 donation can become $0.97/$0.77/$-1.03/... (yes it can be a negative number)
This explains why there are decimal numbers even if donations are integers.

The thanks.dev platform is only related to dependencies, as golangci-lint is a tool and not a library, the system is not adapted for the project.
The donations seem to appear on the 13th of each month (I don't have enough data to be sure if it is always the 13).
For now, we have only received one-time donations.
The thanks.dev donations are not transferred automatically to Open Collective.
When I will transfer them, fees will be applied, but they are not a part of this report as I don't know them for now.

Here is the financial data (extracted from Open Collective and thank.dev).
I only keep the last 3 months for better readability.

• Donation platform balances:

	2024-11	2024-12	2025-01		AVG (3 months)	AVG (all times)
GitHub Sponsors	$108.26	$51.50	$155.29		$105.02	$49.97
Open Collective	$0.00	$0.00	$22.00		$7.33	$2.75
Thanks.dev	$0.00	$3.01	$4.63		$2.55	$0.96
Total	$108.26	$54.51	$181.92		$111.56	$53.68
Fee	$-10.83	$-5.15	$-20.07		$-12.02	$-5.57
Total	$97.43	$49.36	$161.85		$102.88	$48.11

There are between 10% and 20% fees on transactions, this is related to payment platforms like Stripe, PayPal, and Open Collective.
You can see the details of the fees on golangci-lint profile on Open Collective

During the last 3 months, golangci-lint received an average of $102.88 per month after the fees.

I will talk about theoretical Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), which is related to recurring donations only and without considering prorated amounts, fees, etc.
So those numbers are higher than the reality.

The theoretical MRR is important because it is a good indicator of growth and sustainability.

	2024-11	2024-12	2025-01
Theoretical MRR	$77	$72	$76

My personal (related to different OSS I maintain) theoretical MRR:

	2024-11	2024-12	2025-01
Theoretical MRR	$40	$82	$84

I live in France, I should convert USD to EUR (currently $1 is between 0.90€ and 0.95€).
I should also pay taxes: I don't know exactly how many, but it is at least 22%.

It's not enough to pay rent, food, bills, or travel to FOSDEM, but at least we can pay for our 4 domains (to avoid another domain squatting) and email accounts with a custom domain (required by some institutional entities).

---

I conclude I must improve the funding strategy.

I'm waiting for the answer about a funding program, but I have no real hope for this answer because I think that golangci-lint doesn't really meet the criteria.
I will continue to look for funding programs and apply to them, but there are not a lot of funding programs for OSS, it takes a lot of time (the joy of administrative forms in English 😢), and funds answers take months.

I promoted the v2 on social networks, I pinned the issue about v2, there are donation buttons on the readme, the changelog, the home page on the website, etc., but it is clearly not enough, I feel like we are missing most of the golangci-lint users or the incentives are not good.

I wonder if adding a log, displayed maybe on -/+10% of the runs during a predefined period, can improve the situation 🤔

Additionally, there are 0 donations from businesses/companies 🤔