Financial Plan for Mastodon.ie and Daoine.eu

Hello all, we wanted to share information about current finance for Mastodaoine CLG, the non-profit organisation in charge of Mastodon.ie, as well as our plans to increase transparency on an ongoing basis. We’d also like to be clear about what impact other projects are likely to have, which is currently not a large impact.

Broad Overview

Reserves of donated funds - €15,673.97 as of 29th April 2025 - are currently sufficient to keep mastodon.ie, and related services, running for over two years. Current donations are covering costs every month, with some change left over.

In this context, the volunteers behind mastodon.ie are seeking to run some more software for the community, as outlined here. The additional spend for this is one Hetzner dedicated server, at a cost of €49.84 per month. This has been paid once to date.

The current monthly spend for Mastodon hosting is €447.72 per month.

All income is from donations on our Open Collective page, which Stripe transfer to us minus charges. Thanks as always to our donors for making this possible.

Regular Spend

These are the things we spend money on regularly.

• €447.20pm Mastodon hosting from masto.host
• €7pm Proton email for correspondence
• ~€3 Mailgun for automated email (password reset, etc - charge is by usage, .1c per mail)
• €40pa Bitwarden for secure sharing of access info
• €26pm Libretranslate to enable translation of posts
• €10pm Workhub for a company PO box
• €320pa Company secretary as a service from Irish Formations

An average monthly spend is, therefore, about €523

New Spend

• €50pm Hetzner server

This would make an average month cost about €573, an increase of roughly 10%

Past donations are considered to be for Mastodon.ie

We want to reassure donors that the money they gave in order to support the Mastodon instance, mastodon.ie is not going be invested into some new software which wasn’t under discussion at the time. Funds that were given to keep mastodon.ie alive will be used to keep mastodon.ie alive.

The end date of what is considered “past donations” will be the 31st May ‘25, inclusive.

Two months of server costs for Hetzner will have been incurred, about €100, but that will be “paid back” into the total from June donations.

All items listed under “Regular Spend” above are considered a valid use of these funds.

Future donations are considered to be for Daoine.eu

Click here to read about the goals of Daoine.eu

The majority of the spend will still be for mastodon.ie and related services, but it is to be understood that other software and websites may be funded from future donations. We will always clearly communicate in advance any plans, and allow time for donors and community members to have their say and ask questions. This is still controlled by Mastodaoine Company Limited by Guarantee, which was set up to oversee running of mastodon.ie.

Open Collective for mastodon.ie will be changed to reflect that it is for the broader Daoine project. This will also happen on 31st May ‘25.

It is currently expected that mastodon.ie will be the main cost for the foreseeable future, and currently considered new projects are less resource intensive, and far less expensive to run. At some point, an exciting technology that everyone wants, but which is expensive to run, may be adopted. The organisation will not invest anything in “Past Donations” into such a technology.

Only funds donated from 1st June ‘25 onwards will be eligible.

Financial Report for April 2025

Total in: €544.01

Total out: €526.51

This gives a net increase of €17.50, with an end of month balance of €15,673.97

We will be publishing more reports in this format in future, as well giving a broader overivew of costs over the year, “burn rate” and more.