Fundraising campaign December 2020

Miraheze is a not-for-profit and open source project with the purpose of providing free and accessible online collaborative and editing environments to communities, organisations and individuals alike. Since 2015, we have been providing high-quality wiki hosting and support to serve thousands of communities. Miraheze runs on the power of volunteers contributing in various ways, such as writing content, handling support requests and funding the organisation. The project model is community-centric and gives all stakeholders an important voice in the development of Miraheze. Miraheze is an ad-free and independent wiki farm; therefore, all donations are provided by community members.

Donate Now: GoFundMe (credit card) GitHub Sponsors, PayPal and others

Results of the past year
Miraheze does not have physical housing costs and all volunteers are unpaid. As a result of that, more than 95% of our expenses go towards the servers required to keep Miraheze running. In 2019, a fundraising campaign was set up to fund Miraheze a new server cluster. While the original ideas were not implemented since our fundraising goal was not reached, we have implemented new ideas that were financially feasible for Miraheze. Even though the new plan would not cause a dramatic reduction in the monthly expenses (OpEx), it would avoid the need for huge one-time investments (CapEx). Since March, when many countries demanded people to work from home, we have noticed a lot of extra traffic. In fact, since our traffic has increased at a much faster rate than our expenses do (see graph), the plan with the new servers seems to have worked well for Miraheze. On top of that, barring occasional issues, services are more stable and most downtimes caused by insufficient resources have been eliminated.

Between December 17, 2019, and December 12, 2020, Miraheze received  and spent. As of December 12, 2020, the account balance is. The current balance is sufficient until May 2021 (see graph). Miraheze aims to be transparent in its operations and allows anyone to review financial data via the Finance page. Finally, financial summaries from the governing Board are public as well.

Current financial situation
Miraheze has grown at an even more accelerated pace than we had anticipated in December 2019. Back then, we had about 45,000 unique visitors per day. Little did we know we would have about 120,000 unique visitors (+267%) per day in December 2020! In 2020, the costs have increased from  (December 2019) to   (December 2020), which is about 11% more than last year. While the community growth is awesome news for a community-centric project like Miraheze, the increase in traffic requires resource upgrades to allow us to cope with the growth of the project. Our monitoring systems show there is not much room for growth, causing stability issues at peak times.

If we were to anticipate another ~267% growth in traffic from December 2020 to December 2021 (from 120,000 unique visitors/day in December 2019 to 320,000 in December 2021), we aim to extend capacity by purchasing new servers in Q1 or Q2 2021, on top of keeping most of our current servers. Expenses are estimated to climb to  (+37%), which is +/- £4000 per year. This sum will allow us to expand the capacity of the current infrastructure and implement new systems to enhance the services for our communities, while avoiding scenarios where the expenses have to increase at higher rates than the growth of Miraheze and its communities.

An overview of this plan is visible at Miraheze Meta.

Impact of my donation
Miraheze offers high quality wiki hosting and support, thanks to the gracious, fortunate, and appreciated monetary contributions of many volunteers. By contributing via donations, you help to keep a collaboration platform free and functional for dozens of universities, educational workings groups and other not-for-profit communities. Your donation also helps us to stay ad-free and independent.

We do not require a minimum amount: £10 is a perfect starting point for a one-time donation. If you wish to make recurring donations, £5/month is also very gracious. Shall you want to donate more in order to cover the costs for those communities who can't, other donation amounts are welcome as well. Miraheze aims for the 'many hands make light work' model: 200 users donating £20 per year or 170 users donating £2 per month, either option allows Miraheze to invest back into the community.

If you have any questions, suggestions or want to find out how you can support Miraheze beyond just donating, you can write on the talk page or email us using.

Organisations using Miraheze

 * Ada Developers Academy
 * Bristol Community Health
 * Filipino Student Council of New South Wales
 * International Union for Conservation of Nature
 * Jackson Heights Initiative
 * NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence
 * Open Government Pioneers
 * Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations
 * Thunis (Saarland University Theatre Group)
 * Wikimedia Indonesia

Note: If you are affiliated with any of the above organisations, we would be most appreciative if you spoke with your department head or other organisation team leader about your organisation making a much appreciated and generous monetary donation to Miraheze in view of the hundreds or thousands of dollars Miraheze has saved your organisation. Likewise, if you are affiliated with an organisation not listed above, please let us know on this campaign's talk page.

And more: see the gazetteer of wikis.

Additional information
These graphs are included for informational purposes.


 * Unique visitors per day

(source: Matomo - visit Special:Analytics for statistics for any wiki)


 * Monthly expenses between

(for converting USD to GBP, a conversion rate from December 11, 2020 was used)


 * Predicted run down of account balance in 2021 - in case of no income


 * Ratio of expenses to traffic

Disclaimer
Miraheze is operated by Miraheze Limited, which is registered in England and Wales (Registration Number: 12323854).