After the OffBeatr crowdfunding campaign ended, a lot of people still wanted to contribute but couldn’t, either because they didn’t have a credit card, or they had one but it didn’t get along with OB. I set up another method of donating, and promised that I’d do updates on how much extra money I collected and what I spent it on, for transparency’s sake.
Yesterday I received the OffBeatr payout (woot!), so now’s as good a time as any to do a breakdown of how much money the project has. I’ve decided to do these monthly because weekly is just too much bookkeeping.
Trigger warning: Contains accounting. All figures are in USD.
| Total pledged | $12,062.00 |
| Total collected (Less failed transactions) | $11,457.00 |
| Offbeatr Fee (20%) | $2,291.40 |
| Net Offbeatr Revenue | $9,165.60 |
| Gumroad total (February) | $1,620.00 |
| Num Gumroad donations (February) | 172 |
| Gumroad fees | $124.00 |
| Gumroad total after fees | $1,496.00 |
| Paypal revenue | $84.27 |
| Total revenue | $10,745.87 |
| Income tax owed | $1,128.32 |
| Cost of goods (eBook rewards) | $288.00 |
| Paypal fee | $14.41 |
| Total COGS | $302.41 |
| Salary (Weekly, backdated from crowdfunding end date) | |
| 01/02/13 | $330.00 |
| 08/02/13 | $330.00 |
| 15/02/13 | $330.00 |
| 22/02/13 | $330.00 |
| Total salary | $1,320.00 |
| Hosting expenses | |
| For Feb 2013 | $111.35 |
| Contractor expenses | |
| Writing | $45.50 |
| Total contractor expenses | $45.50 |
| Total expenses | $2,907.58 |
| Project balance remaining | $7,838.29 |
Notes
- Now just in case you only looked at the top and bottom lines and are apoplectic, a lot of the decrease is due to one off deductions rather than continuing expenses. OffBeatr’s cut and income tax ate (or will eat) around 30% of the lump sum, and I’ve deducted both immediately. If I never receive any more donations, I have at least 15 weeks worth of funds (till Mid June) including what I intend to spend on contractors.
- I haven’t spent much on writing yet, but not for lack of trying! I want to scale this up and I hope to have more news soon.
- Donations via Gumroad (the new donation system) did really well this month, but it’s mostly due to pent up demand that’s levelling off.
- Hosting expenses are way too high. When the site was melting down after Fen plugged it, I opened the throttle on everything I could lay my hands on, and I’m slowly finding out what the happy mediums are for all the various services. Expect this to decrease in future.
Wow I never knew OB charged 20%. I guess they can get away with it due to lack of competition, but I thought it’d be something closer to kickstarter’s 5% + amazon’s 5%.
Also have you talked with any kind of tax professional? From my understanding on kickstarter campaigns is they usually don’t end up paying taxes because the income tax is amount received – expenses. And since all of the money usually goes towards the project as expenses there’s nothing left to tax.
I know you probably already looked into it, it’s one of the first things I would do, but I thought I’d bring it up just in case. Also I in no way know anything about taxes, my comments come from about an hour of googling to satisfy my curiosity.
So looking into it a bit more it seems it’s taxed differently if it’s a hobby with no intention to profit, which seems to fit a lot better for this. Good thing I had that I know nothing disclaimer at the end there.
According to offbeatr, they charge the 20% percent rather than kicksterter’s 10% because their credit processor charges them more for the service. Turns out credit cards and the like don’t like working with adult businesses. They feel it has a larger risk of charge-backs.