As we approach a new year I would like to have an open discussion as a community about the financing of this website, what it takes to keep it going, and what we might do to make it financially sustainable as an operation. Everyone who cares about this project and participates here is a stakeholder, so I'm inviting you to the discussion.

The reality is it's been expensive to run this website. We do not run ads, which means we've relied on our community and volunteers entirely for funding to pay for a dynamic website that gets millions of pageviews per month. And since we didn't start fundraising until our 21st operating month we started fundraising at a deficit, expenses which I had covered hoping to get paid back eventually.

We've been running this site for 40 months and we've been fundraising for 20 months (not including this month). In that time, the site has cost over $34,000 and we've raised nearly of $26,000 through our site and our Substack. It's absolutely amazing that we have raised that much money and I'm incredibly grateful. We still need to raise an extra $8,000 on top of our ongoing expenses in the future to break even, and with price increases and the current rate we raise funds, that's going several years. We've dedicated a lot of effort to running this site cost-effectively and it's pretty phenomenal what our developers have managed to do. I don't believe we can substantially lower costs anymore than we already have, especially as services raise their prices due to inflation or other reasons.

To meet this need we're raising our monthly donation goal to $1,500 in January. We have around 1,000 regular monthly users, so this averages out to around $1.50 per regular, or an average of $15 a month per person if 10% of our regulars donated. If we meet our fundraising goal and prices don't increase too much then we could break even by the time we hit our five year anniversary.

We started this platform when the communities we had been running for years got kicked off of Reddit when they suddenly decided to cave into pressure and stop allowing women-only and feminist discussion that didn't cater to the whims of men who claim to identify as women. At the time Twitter was also censoring feminist discussion that wasn't obedient to the most absurd of male desires, and the increasing censorship of feminists on social media was a disturbing trend. We were being marginalized. Since Twitter has changed leadership and reversed policies some of the pressure has been relieved. However, we still think it's valuable that we control our own resource here and preserve our own history, as well as continue to provide a platform that isn't compromised by male control or the capricious pressure from activists, advertisers, investors, or fake-sounding government agencies.

If this site is valuable to you I hope you think it's worth helping with the costs of the site. I've had a really hard time asking for help with the expenses. I know a lot of people are struggling, and there are a lot of financial needs for various projects and needs in the feminist movement. However, I've done and continue to do a lot of free work to keep this project going. It's important that the costs are ultimately covered by the community. That's an important signal that the work we've done and continue to do is valuable.

Do you have ideas about features we could implement that would encourage donations?

These are some things I've been thinking about:

• We will be making it so that lurkers will be able to donate via our site. Although lurkers can already donate via our substack, it takes a significant cut. And even though nearly 80% of our traffic is from lurkers we don't actively ask them for help.

• We're thinking about adding an "ovation" feature, where you could give posts or comments ovations as a special way to acknowledge them. Ovations would cost some amount of money and they would not be anonymous. They would be added to a special list.

• I've also been considering private posts not viewable by lurkers (site viewers who don't have accounts) as a kind of premium feature. It's really important that people don't think we can protect their privacy at a high degree. Even posts that lurkers wouldn't be able to see could be screenshotted and posted elsewhere by bad actors who got accounts. But we could allow people who pay for premium features to make posts (and the comments on the post) users-only. Other features that would be subscription-based are worth considering.

Again, thank you for coming along on this journey with us. All the community that is found on Ovarit is made by all of you, for each other. It's been an amazing experience to be responsible for maintaining the platform to host it. What we create here is unique and it means a lot to so many women, even ones who don't make accounts. But the costs are real. Please help if you can. Every contribution matters.