We just paid our yearly Givebutter subscription for $1,548.00. We love Givebutter and don’t begrudge them their compensation, but these costs add up. We need lots of software to run a legally compliant and community responsive nonprofit organization.

As part of our mission, we hire neurodivergent and disabled people and invest in their professional development. We don't think of administrative costs as pure “overhead", though we are mindful of how much we spend. We consider administrative costs a component of our mission. We provide our staff and volunteers with the tools they need. We include folks in our software subscriptions and licenses so that they can build out their tool belts as we help each other build this thing.

Another part of our mission is to create community and space for passion-based, human-centered learning, with purpose. Online, we bring safety to the serendipity with our distributed community and communication stack. Chance favors the connected mind. Our learners connect using 1:1 laptops and indie ed-tech. We give our learners real laptops with real capabilities, and we fill those laptops with assistive tech and tools of the trades.

Our multi-age learners join our Systems team, our Editorial team, our Events team, our Design team, our Art team, and so on to help us make the organization. We use the collaboration tools and techniques we helped develop at WordPress.org, WordPress.com, WordCamp.org, and Automattic.com, among the first fully-distributed communities and companies.

Help us pay our software and server bills. Help us keep learning and sharing that learning.

Donate to our software fund.

Behold our thick stack of SaaS:

WordPress.com – Web publishing, team communication, a domain of our own
Discord – Team communication
Notion – Team communication, task management, and documentation
1Password – Team password management and secure document storage
Google Workspace – Email, calendars, live document editing, file storage
HubSpot – Customer relationship management, grant management, and sales and donation pipelining that connects with lots of platforms
QuickBooks – Bookkeeping, payroll, budgeting, money management, invoicing, tax compliance
Buffer – Social media management and analytics
WPForms – Form builder that connects to WordPress, HubSpot, and Zapier
Givebutter – Donation collection and management platform.
WooCommerce – Online store that connects to WordPress, HubSpot, and Zapier
Zapier – Automation platform that connects all this software together
GitHub – Revision management and issue tracking
Setapp – An Apple based software subscription service that gets you access to hundreds of professional apps for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS
Raindrop.io – Team bookmarking, highlighting, annotation, and document management

Learn more about our technology philosophy and how it serves toolbelt theory, constructionism, collaborative niche construction, and bricolage:

Donate to our software fund.

It takes a lot of software to run this thing.