Hi everyone, thank you for this feedback! I absolutely agree that more transparency in our financials is a great idea, and in that spirit I’m going to summarize where we’re at right now, and how we’re thinking about next year’s budget.
2021
Emily and I started full time on Feb 22nd, 2021. At that point the wonderful people who got the Foundation up and running had raised $327,0000. That fundraising success gave the Interim Board confidence that bringing on two people full time was financially reasonable.
Sponsors
Here’s the breakdown of the contributions:
- IOHK - $125,000
- GitHub - $70,000 *Note: This contribution is earmarked for GHC developer support
- Well Typed - $25,000
- Mercury - $12,000
- Flipstone - $20,000
- Tweag - $25,000
- Obsidian - $25,000
- EMQ - $25,000
Since we started, we’ve received the following donations:
- Digtal Asset - $70,000
- Exfreight - $25,000
- TripShot - $10,000
- HERP - $10,000
We have more in the pipeline at various stages, but we do not count on checks that haven’t cleared.
Individuals
@cdsmith is absolutely right, he is not the only individual to have donated, although he is by far the most generous to date. We have 13 individual contributors, of which 11 are recurring monthly!
Most are in the $5 - $10 / month range, we have one at $20, another at $50 (!!), and cdsmith’s amazing contributions which, annualized, gets him to the Applicative sponsorship level!
Of the one time donations, one was for $20, and the other for $1,000 - absolutely wonderful.
Spending
By far our greatest cost is payroll for Emily and I, which will be (with worker’s comp, payroll taxes, benefits, and everything) just under $300,000 for this year.
We also have the GHC support that GitHub earmarked its contribution for, of which we’ve used only a little more than $12,000 of so far.
We’ve contributed $1,000 to HLS’s Summer of Code project, and spent around $1,000 on various expenses involved with being in business.
Budget
That leaves a bunch left over, and here’s our budget for the rest of the year: $6,000 for support of the Haskell Interlude podcast, $9,000 more for technical agenda work, $10,000 more for community support, $10,000 for marketing (Haskell to companies and individuals, the HF to potential sponsors, an HF merch shop, etc.), and a little over $4,000 for misc. expenses.
2022
The trick for next year’s budget is estimating how many sponsors will renew their contributions, at what levels, and how successful we will continue to be finding new ones. We definitely want to expand our programs and support dramatically now that we’re well established and in good financial position.
Our current thinking is a technical agenda budget of $50,000, community $25,000, marketing $20,000, misc. at $15,000, and we would start setting aside reserve funds of approximately $100,000 to ensure that we can weather periods of low funding in the future.
I would love to hire a small number of new staff as well, but unless we are more successful with fundraising than our current (very conservative) numbers, we don’t feel comfortable bringing anyone on full time. Potential positions include DevOps (for support of GHC, HF, and community projects), Community Manager, and even a Release Manager if things were extremely positive.
Funding Funding Funding
We are here to help Haskell become more successful. I will post our August Update later today which links to @emilypi’s technical proposal process PR, which allows the community to guide our support. The more resources we have (money, volunteer time and energy, hardware, etc.) the more we can get done, but we have to find the right projects to spend those resources on, and we need your help to figure that out!
Fin
I hope that answered the bulk of the questions and concerns, and I’m happy to answer more!