[Members] Future of fiscal hosting

Hi folks, The XSF needs to decide on the future of its fiscal hosting programme. For those unfamiliar, fiscal hosting is a service the XSF has been offering for a few years now. It allows qualifying XMPP-related projects to essentially use the XSF as a way to receive money (e.g. donations from sponsors) and pay expenses (e.g. server costs). This saves projects from the trouble of setting up their own organization, bank account, and so on. To help organize this, we use the Open Collective platform which was purpose-built for this kind of arrangement. However, Open Collective have let us know that they will be raising their prices in 2026: https://pricing-2026.opencollective.com/ Under their previous pricing, our usage did not incur any costs and we were able to use their platform for free. They are planning to charge us ~$15/month per project ("collective") that we host. This is very expensive relative to the amount of funding we are enabling. For example: We currently have 5 collectives, and I checked their "estimated annual budget" earlier this year when the new pricing was announced (income was calculated by OpenCollective based on the prior 12 months of activity): Mellium: $15/month == 180% of their annual budget Prav: $15/month == 50% of their annual budget diasp.in: $15/month == 1000% of their annual budget Bifrost: dormant, $0 raised during past 12 months Prav iOS app: $15/month == 178% of their annual budget If we end the fiscal hosting programme, we will need to transfer to existing projects any funds that we are currently holding for them. If we continue, we need to agree that the expenses are justified. I propose this topic as an agenda item for the next board meeting (15th December). In the meantime, if any members have opinions, please feel free to share them. Regards, Matthew