Cheddargirl wrote:

One of the known pitfalls of having things run on donation money is that it's dependent on how much and when those donations come in. Most donate one time, few do recurring donations and these have a tendency to be kind of small. A lot of our large recurring donations come from larger organizations, and sometimes these might not come in at a consistent time due to factors at their organizations, and we do have to acknowledge the possibility they could also stop donating (or, in the case of some services, start charging instead of offering the service as a donation). This kind of makes it hard to plan things like fixes or features (or, in the case of services, it could be disruptive). Which isn't great.

Hence why we now have this membership. You might notice it's slightly higher than the typical donation tier.

Is it kinda strange to take this route to make donating a higher amount more incentive in order to plan things ahead? Yeah, we acknowledge that. But we're also getting pretty large, and it's not unusual to also see other large nonprofit organizations that run on donation money (e.g. PBS) to have a membership options where everything isn't locked behind a paywall, it's just that members get some earlier/easier access to stuff.

So, no, we're not blowing all this money on events.

(On the opposite end is to be insistent that you guys do not blow the current donation money on things that would stress out the website servers or ST services thin. So uh, you know, don't break the community guidelines, don't misuse the website as a chatting space, don't spam, don't feed the trolls, don't flamepost, etcetera etcetera).