A big thank you to everyone who has helped out so far! We love you! We'll be showing our love before the weekend is out...
However, we want to give an update on where we're up to from the help provided so far.
At this moment we have 15 subscribers (up from 9 earlier today), donating in the following pattern:
- 5 * £2.50 / month
- 5 * £5 / month
- 5 * £10 / month
That makes £87.50 in raw subscription monies, or
£81.55 after PayPal have their cut (6.8% loss on the portfolio).
We've also had some generous one-off donations totalling to £45 (spread over 5 individuals). That means that the monies owed to Haven have effectively decreased to
£278 (once we've paid him). Good work everyone!
As mentioned, our server costs aren't just the £64.58. We intermittently pay for maintenance for vBulletin[1], we also need to look at saving up for hardware maintenance for Promethius[2], and of course we need to pay off the backlog to Haven.
Haven has requested we clear the backlog in the next 6 months. To do that and keep up with our future server payments, we need to be looking at more like £110.92 (£64.58 + £278/6) in subscription monies (assuming no further donations into the backlog pot).
Also, to build up a notional pot of £600 over the next six months to cover hardware maintenance, we need to add £50 / month to that figure or, more realistically, £30 / month for the first six months, then £70 / month for the second six months. That'd put our donations requirement to more like
£140 to sustain ourselves. (If we didn't have any backlog, then that would be more like £115.)
So, we're still a fair way shy of where we need to be to realistically sustain Promethius: at least £33.45 / month and possibly as much as £58.45 / month more than we currently have.
We've done
really well today, enough to keep Promethius ticking 'til she needs maintenance, but not yet enough to pay off the backlog or keep her maintained when she reaches end of life.
That said, Bob is going to fire up a raffle (tomorrow, I believe), which should help with the backlog and we're hopeful that a few more of you can help us out with subscriptions. To that end, I'm going to look at some alternative subscriptions that don't turn out to be too much overall but will still help us out (and be more efficient than the 11.4% loss to PayPal on the £2.50 subscriptions).
Footnotes:
[1] We may choose not to keep our vBulletin maintenance up any longer as they've moved off into a new version and we haven't upgraded with them and frankly we've been semi-intermittent on it already and it's not really hurting us. We own our licence so maybe we don't need to worry.
[2] Some parts of Promethius are 7 years old. Newer bits are maybe two years old. Sometime in the next 12 months, Haven will likely need to some serious hardware maintenance, which will likely include swapping the hard drive(s) and so on. All monies, unfortunately.
tl;dr
Thanks and good work all! Really could do with more monies though... At least £33.45 / month. Possibly £58.45 / month more.
