Hello everyone,

Following up on the discussion regarding fiscal hosting after a Board meeting:

The Board has reviewed the current program and agrees that, at its current scale, the effort and administrative overhead are not justified. There is consensus to phase out the fiscal hosting program in its current form.

We plan to handle this carefully, supporting existing hosted projects in transitioning to alternative funding mechanisms such as direct donations, Liberapay, or other platforms. This will help reduce disruption while ensuring fairness to the projects.

Please let us know if you have any immediate concerns or suggestions regarding this transition. We aim to ensure a smooth wind-down without impacting ongoing project activities.

Kind regards,

   Guus

On Fri, Dec 5, 2025 at 2:13 PM Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter@stpeter.im> wrote:
On 12/5/25 6:06 AM, Matthew Wild wrote:
> On Fri, 5 Dec 2025 at 12:49, Matthew Wild <mwild1@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> The XSF needs to decide on the future of its fiscal hosting programme.
>
> Apologies for the double post, but Mathieu highlighted that I had
> overlooked some communication from Open Collective. They wrote:
>
>> In the message we sent, we initially recommended the $59 / $649 plan because it seemed you were using the Wise or PayPal payout option.
>>
>> One important part of our pricing is that we're counting "Active Collectives" which we currently define as having a transaction in the month. According to this metric, XSF currently have 0 or 1 active collective in the last months, meaning you should fall on the free tier if you're not using the Wise or PayPal payout option.

Well, here's the other problem I have with this new pricing model.

We use Wise to reimburse volunteers (and, to date, to complete payouts
from O.C. to fically hosted projects) because it saves us a lot of money
compared to old-fashioned wire transfers. Do we really want to pay a $25
bank fee every time we do a payout? Maybe there are other options (e.g.,
transfer funds from O.C. to our bank account and then to Wise, rather
than using a Wise integration directly at O.C.), and I can look into
that, but it seems rather Byzantine.

Peter