This is a very short summary of the 2024 financials of Couchers, Inc.: the 501(c)3 non-profit that supports Couchers.org.

Couchers is aiming to raise $5000 in 2025 to pay for hosting the platform, and supporting the development and growth of the community. This is the less than 10 cents per user. We'll reach this goal if just one in a thousand users chip in with $10!

You can donate to support the project by logging in and going to the Donate page!

What we spent money on

Couchers spent $1948.26 in 2024, equivalent to 4.1 cents per user, the breakdown of costs is as follows:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) — $1524.64 (78.3%): hosting of the Couchers.org platform and development/support/moderation tools
• Calendly — $162.00 (8.3%): meeting scheduling platform we use to organize volunteer onboarding calls
• Zoom — $159.89 (8.2%): videoconferencing platform for volunteer meetings
• Expo.dev — $39.00 (2.0%): a development tool to automatically build and deploy preview versions of the upcoming native app
• Porkbun — $37.73 (1.9%): internet domain registrar
• Google Play — $25.00 (1.3%): signing up for a Google Play account to distribute the upcoming Android app

Where we received money from

Couchers received $1257.13 via donations from the community after Stripe fees (our payment processor). We processed $1345.01 of donations and paid fees of $58.72 in 2024 (note that there is a slight discrepancy to what showed up in our bank account in 2024 due to a few day delay in Stripe paying out donations). That is, we paid 4.4% in payment processing fees. Larger donations have a lower per-transaction fee (if you would like to make a large donation, we can issue a one-off invoice for a bank transfer that has practically no fee).

There were 33 unique donors who donated money in 87 transactions. 20 donors donated $10 or less, 8 donors donated more than $10 but $50 or less, and 5 donors donated more than $50. The three donors who are on the board donated 57% of the total.

You can donate to Couchers via the donation page when logged in.

Account balance

We started the year with $1270.31 in the bank account and ended it with $574.67, with donations covering 64.5% of our operating expenses.

Outlook for 2025

In 2025 we plan to reduce these expenses in various ways: we have reduced our number of Zoom licenses, gotten lower fees on Calendly, and are doing some cost optimizations in AWS. Nonetheless, we expect hosting costs on AWS to go up due to us hosting more support services, we expect Expo.dev costs to increase as we progress on the native mobile apps, and we expect to incur some fees for Strong Verification and postcard verification. We are now paying for Vercel (last year they provided the service to us for free), a tool to build developer previews of the platform, and expect this to cost us $240 this year. Finally, as we have been iterating and designing new features, we have grown out of our free Figma account (a collaborative tool for UI/UX design) and will need to pay for licenses going forward.

We project that these basic expenses will reach roughly $3000 in 2025.

We are currently working on Couchers.org branded merchandise (hoodies, t-shirts, etc), and if we are able to raise more money, we hope to use some of it to support local communities (e.g. providing a free Couchers.org flag to help find people at in-person meetups), encouraging development & volunteering (discounted Couchers volunteer branded merchandise), and similar initiatives.

The Board has set a fundraising goal of $5000 for 2025. In addition to fully covering the current basic expenses, we hope that this gives us some financial resilience going forward, as well as giving us flexibility in deploying cash for initiatives like supporting local communities and volunteering.

We hope this quick analysis helps you understand our financial situation, and in particular, that it may encourage you to donate to support the running costs of Couchers. This analysis was based on exports from our bank account and from Stripe which processes our donations, so some minor discrepancies may exist between rigorous accounting.

Written by Aapeli, reviewed by the Board. Published on 2025/04/20

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