Support us

We are currently entirely reader supported and welcome one-off or monthly donations to support us in our mission.

To set up a monthly subscription, click on the “subscribe” button in the bottom right (it'll be a GFSC logo if you've signed in) or through this link. Subscribers get community-supported access to all our hosted services like Mastodon and Mailman.

For one-off donations use the button below:

Where do my donations go?

Currently we are focussed on breaking even. The estimated costs to run Geeks for Social Change (a UK-registered not-for-profit) for 2025 are about £4,000. This covers:

• Accountancy and legal compliance fees
• Hosting our PlaceCal servers
• Hosting our community services like Mastodon, Mailman, etc
• Hosting this blog and a Mailgun account for email sending
• A small amount of tech support for the things we can't do ourselves
• Software as a service fees for things like GSuite
• Domain names

We've got more detail on our current organisational structure and hosting costs in our June 25 update post. Self hosting is way more expensive to get going with than commercial software (something we want to address as part of our mission!), so we really appreciate all the support getting to this break even point.

What are your plans after that?

As soon as we break even we're looking to start paying Kim, our founder, to run the project sustainably. We're also looking to start paying blog authors an honorarium, get some paid admin support, and cover some SaaS fees we can't justify at the moment.

Do you have any other plans to raise money?

Yes!

Funding bids

We're working with a consortium of tech practitioners and studios on various funding bids to run part of GFSC. However we've found that this funding is very lumpy and so it's best to use it for set projects with a beginning, middle and end and not rely on it for core organisational costs. Direct donations therefore do more than anything else to help us be sustainable!

Media production

We are in the early stages of looking into producing video content as a paid service. Do you want us to profile your cool community tech project? Need help documenting your process building a thing so you have something to show your funder? Want someone to organise some IRL events to promote a thing you're working on, or us to make some promotional content for you?

Get in touch and let's see what we can do. More on this coming soon.

PlaceCal training

We offer PlaceCal training for organisations who want to start using the tool. This is mandatory to start using it but then once onboarded all we ask is a small monthly contribution to hosting. Please do get in touch if you'd like to start using it for your organisation!