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Comment by david_allison | Hacker News Reader

Unsure whether they're using a different fee model for the "Fund" payments. But they're open about the fees for payments from individuals (each transaction on a collective's page shows the fee breakdown).

> Open Collective takes 10% + credit card fees (usually 3% + $0.30/transaction) [0]

A few concrete examples (dependent upon payment processor chosen)

For $1, a collective got ~$0.56

For $100, a collective got ~$86.60

I was getting very close to the inter-bank exchange rate for payouts.

[0] https://medium.com/open-collective/what-is-open-collective-h....

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10% is a lot of overhead for just being an index fund. Imagine if vanguard took 10% overhead for their management.

I’d rather go through things like GitHub sponsorships that take 0%. Or I’d rather see a community oriented process that is OSS and just tries to connect donors to projects so I can donate directly to projects and just pay credit card processing fees.

> 10% is a lot of overhead for just being an index fund. Imagine if vanguard took 10% overhead for their management.

I think Open Collective has a new pricing scheme [1] where they don't take anything if the fiscal host doesn't either, but I think more people should consider the work that fiscal hosts have to do.

Unlike Vanguard, Open Collective and the fiscal hosts might not have enough diversified income sources to pay for all the dev work and other manual labour that comes with handling money.

Bookkeeping/accounting work and annual compliance filings are both tedious and expensive. :(

> I’d rather go through things like GitHub sponsorships that take 0%.

GitHub/Microsoft is absorbing the Stripe fee for GitHub sponsorships, which amounts to something like ~2.9% – 4%.

[1] https://opencollective.com/pricing

Hi! Pia here from Open Collective - In the FUNDS case the fees are taken when the Fund is created. Donations from the Fund are free of fees afterwards. Since the Funds are generally bank payments, there's no Stripe fees in this case.

So for bank payments, what kind of fees are we talking about?

It's 10% which gets shared 5% & 5% between the platform and the non for profit that is the custodian of the funds (and provides compliance, tax filing, 1099s,etc)

Isn't there a new pricing structure [1] that's a 15% revenue share with the fiscal host?

That works out to Open Collective taking 1.5% overall, if the fiscal host takes 10% gross.

[1] https://opencollective.com/pricing

> Open Collective takes 10%

That's honestly a lot.

Open Collective takes 5% and the other 5% goes to the non profit that provides fiscal sponsorship for the projects.

That’s still a lot, I think. Compared to other charities using a site like charitynavigator.org you can see that is a high price for a charity.

It’s also an odd legal structure to separate the platform from a non-profit to do admin tasks, since non-profits are not really that good at doing admin and compliance.

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