44.Funding, Infrastructure costs, Images on Amazon

Thanks for your thoughtful consideration of the kinds of nonprofits you support.

For the last three years, iNaturalist has been almost entirely grant funded from individual philanthropists (many with a long history of philanthropy through the California Academy of Sciences), the National Geographic Society, foundations such as the Moore Foundation, and tech companies such as Microsoft through their tAI for Earth initiative, and Google through their tGeo for Good initiative. We also have some project-based funding like the funds we received from the World Wildlife Fund to develop Seek 2.0.

While individual donations from the iNaturalist community currently constitute a small percentage of our overall revenue, we’d love to see that percentage grow. The more sustaining donors we have, the less time we and the development team at CAS have to spend wondering how to meet the next year’s budget requirements.

As a department of the California Academy of Sciences, 15% of additional funds we bring in go toward overhead for CalAcademy, and this includes individual donations. In addition to financial support, they provide office space, legal services, accounting, communications support, and other functions, so the overhead is a way that iNaturalist pays into those costs shared across the institution. The remaining 85% stays within the department to cover staff and operational expenses, like paying Discourse to host this forum, or paying Amazon for image hosting.

The single largest expense for iNaturalist is personnel. iNaturalist has 8 full-time staff in the USA (6 in the Bay Area, 2 remote on the East Coast) and one contractor.

For the CalAcademy fiscal year July 2018 - June 2019, iNaturalist spent $174,000 on infrastructure and miscellaneous expenses. These are the non-personnel related expenses. Like almost everything else about iNaturalist (e.g. users, data, traffic)—except the number of staff— these costs are almost doubling each year.

Donating to iNaturalist 1 (or not) is of course a personal choice. We hope this helps inform your decision. We understand that users have different means and appreciate all of the many ways that people support iNaturalist, financial or otherwise.

1. Gordon en Betty Moore Foundation
2. Microsoft (Azure credits toward servers)
3. Amazon (credits toward image storage)
4. Google Maps (API access credits)
5. Andere inkomsten
6. 485 monthly donations
7. Verkoop Merchandise

Wonder what it takes to keep iNaturalist running?

Here are some of the ongoing expenses:

1. $13 stores 10,000 observation photos for a year (iNat has over 90 million photos and counting)
2. $28 sends one day's worth of email updates
3. $150 supports the iNatForum for a month
4. $333 keeps iNat servers running for 24 hours

Publicado el 16 de noviembre de 2019 por ahospers