From July to September, we've earned $220 in platform fees and $2,100 in monthly subscriptions and Merch purchases, as well as roughly $450 coming in monthly from direct support. This puts us squarely in the category of Somewhat Successful Subscriber Page!
We also have a snapshot for October, the most recent month we have full data for. Just over $400 moved through our platform in album and track sales and about $1,000 moved across it as tips. About half of that tip amount came through the fundraiser for Nashville panel that we ran through the platform; most of the rest came from one other large tip. While we don't yet compare year over year sales on the platform, we intuit that all of this is an improvement.
Now for our expenses: Our hosting costs have peaked a bit over the past months due to increased bandwidth usage of the site, with us spending roughly $700 in Q3 on hosting and related tools and software.
We also wrapped up a research projects for which we paid a contractor $1000, and wrapped up mailing our Kickstarter merch, which cost us about $150. Overall we spent over $1,800 in Q3, which means our cash flow was positive by $1,900! Do note, however, that all of this happens without paying a single person to work on Mirlo, so none of these expenses take into consideration the hours of unpaid work that is offered to the project by our stewards and other volunteers.
As a result, our ending balance was roughly $3,500. This balance includes $3,500 worth of zero-interest loans owed to one of our co-owners; although there is no required timeline for repayment, we will discuss paying some of it back at our next stewards' meeting.
Growth has been slow but it's cool to be at a place where our income covers basic expenses. We are also very excited about the NLNet grant we announced last week. Although this money can't be used towards operating expenses, it will allow us to bring in some help with our code base in order to build a more robust tool for everyone.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://mirlo.space/team/posts/454
