While the Internet is a great tool for helping people collaborate, it is still extremely difficult for groups to collect funds and use them transparently. As a result, we see initiatives, projects, and movements popping up here and there only to disappear quickly due to a lack of funds. Imagine how many wonderful things didn't happen because funding (which is arguably the oxygen for most organizations) is difficult to sustain. Without an easy way to raise and manage finances, most of the ideas that can change the world are rarely able to break open from seed, let alone grow into a full-fledged tree.

To be able to operate, meetups, open-source projects, parent associations, neighbourhood associations, pet projects, clubs, unions, movements, non-profits, business incubators - all are either forced to use a physical glass jar, asking a sponsor to directly pay for their expenses or front the huge overhead of setting up and managing a corporation or a non-profit. Even if they manage to achieve it in a way that is neither inefficient nor opaque, it is overkill.

This is the problem that Open Collective solves. We enable groups to quickly set up a collective, raise funds and manage them transparently.

We want all those seeds to have a chance to grow and give the ideas a fighting chance to reach their true potential. We believe everyone should have the tools to create the organizations of tomorrow. And we are dedicating ourselves to make that happen!

Contact us

Essays

Subscribe to our blog

• A New Form of Association For the Internet Generation, Xavier Damman

• If you can’t beat them, abstract them., Pia Mancini

• A New Way to Fund Open Source Projects, Xavier Damman

• Money and Open Source Communities, Xavier Damman

• Let's Talk About Money, Aseem Sood

• Moving beyond the charity framework, Pia Mancini

• From Firms to Collectives, Xavier Damman

• Being a Circle in a World Made for Triangles, Alanna Irving

• Ten Steps to Successful Open Source Crowdfunding, Alanna Irving

• Turning our City into an Open Collective, Xavier Damman

• Cities Are Open Collectives, Pia Mancini

• From the Internet of Information to the Internet of Actions, Xavier Damman

• The New Citizen, Xavier Damman

Talks

Subscribe to our Talks Playlist on YouTube

• Collaborating with Money, Alanna Irving, New Frontiers, New Zealand November 2018

• Transparent by Design, Pia Mancini, Monki Gras, London 2018

• From the democracy of our voices, to the democracy of our actions - Xavier Damman, Crowdsourcing Week, Luleå (Sweden) March 2018

• Cities as Open Collectives - Pia Mancini, OuiShare Fest, Paris 2017

• Reducing the Friction for Citizens to Create Associations and Sustain Them - Xavier Damman, iMAL, Brussels November 2017

• A new Way of Sustaining Open Source - Pia Mancini, Zeit, Berlin September 2017

• How to Fund Communities and Movements Transparently - Xavier Damman, OuiShare Fest, Paris, 2016

• A New Form of Association to Build a New World, Together - Xavier Damman, OSFEST, Barcelona 2016

Media / Logo

• Download the Open Collective Logo in high resolution: svg - png

Follow us

• Twitter

• Blog

• Instagram

• Facebook

• Linkedin

• TikTok

• Youtube

FAQ

What is Open Collective?

Open Collective is a platform where communities can collect and disburse money transparently, to sustain and grow their projects.

Who is Open Collective for?

Open Collective is great for collaborative groups, like meetups, open-source projects, and more—and for those who want to support them.

Why Open Collective?

The Internet has been really good at helping people do great things together. But things still get complicated once money is involved. These challenges hold communities back from getting all the support they need from supporters and sponsors to achieve their mission.

We enable communities to have economic power, so they can sustain themselves and have a larger impact on the world.

How is Open Collective different from other platforms?

• It's fully transparent (you can see where money comes from and where it goes).

• Designed for ongoing collaborative communities, not one-off campaigns or individual creators.

• Open source and designed for financial and technical transparency.

• Offers fiscal sponsorship as a service, using Fiscal Hosts.

For more information including a full comparison of tech offerings please see our comparison page.

How does it work?

Our platform provides tools for legal entities to fiscally sponsor Collectives under their umbrella, empowering people to create associations without friction. It's like an API between the legacy world of banks and taxes and the emerging future of digitally powered distributed collaborations.

The goal of Open Collective is to create a New Form of Association for the Internet Generation.

Does it work in my country?

People can contribute from anywhere by credit card, with donations denominated in the currency of the Fiscal Host. Payouts work everywhere our payment providers, Stripe and PayPal, serve.

Can I get a receipt for my donations?

Yes! One main purpose of Open Collective is to provide unincorporated projects with the legal and financial structures to provide people receipts and invoices.

Why Open Source?

For starters, we are believers in the open-source philosophy. Our code is open source, and so are the Collectives we host. We think transparency in technology and finances is important.

Additionally, regulations are different all over the world. Our platform is the API between Collectives and things like governments, banks, payment processors, and taxes, which vary a lot by country, so it has to be adaptable to different requirements.

How can I contribute?

We are an open-source project and run as an Open Collective ourselves. You can contribute money, code or translations. And we'd really love it if you started your own Collective and contributed by growing the community!

For more info about how you can contribute to Open Collective, check the contributing page.

How can I contact you?

Contact us or join our Discord!

Setting up a Collective is free, but fees may apply to accept and pay out money.

More details: Open Collective Pricing

Current pricing terminology

Want to see a detailed tour of how money flows on Open Collective?

Previous pricing terminology

We iterated the pricing model a few times before settling on what we think is the best method. We're still updating terms in a few places, so for clarity these are defined here in case you encounter them.

We are all individuals

People are individuals. They can form entities inside Open Collective, like Organizations and Collectives, which enable collaborative impact and define interactions between individuals.

Entities & structure

Human beings with names. An individual signs up to Open Collective with their email address. An individual can take on different roles throughout the platform.

Individual(s) who create and/or manage the Organization profile. They have rights to edit the settings of the Organization, set up financial contributions to Collectives, and set up gift cards, among other things.

Funds

Fiscal hosting enables Collectives to transact financially without needing to legally incorporate. A fiscal host is a legal company or individual who holds a Collective’s funds in their bank account and can generate invoices and receipts for Financial Contributors. You can think of a fiscal host as an umbrella organization for the Collectives in it.

Individual(s) who create and/or manage the Fiscal Host is responsible for approving new Collectives who want to join the host and paying out expenses approved by Collective admins.

Fiscal Host admins want tools and workflows to easily manage their tasks (paying expenses and approving new Collectives). They need to charge their fees and keep a useful accounting system. They are often the first point of contact for the Core Contributors of Collectives they host, and many are super-users.

The primary entity most representative of the basis of our platform. A Collective represents a project or group that has a mission or purpose in the world, which they raise and spend funds transparently to achieve.

Individuals who are major contributors and represent the Collective with their face on the Collective page as part of the team.

A type of Core Contributor with additional permissions, so they can edit the Collective, change settings, approve expenses, make financial contributions to other Collectives, and receive messages from people trying to contact the Collective.

Accountant

Someone in charge of the financial records for the Collective. They have read access to all financial information (receipts, invoices, etc) bot not write access (they can't approve or pay expenses).

Individuals who register to attend a Collective's event. They often arrive through a direct link provided by the event organizers. They want a smooth, hassle-free experience, clear information about the event, and ideally a pathway to stay in touch or become contributors.

Independent Collective

User actions & relationships

The word we will use for "someone who contributes to a project" is "contributor". The buttons on tiers will say "contribute".

Financial Contributors

A company that supports a Collective financially, often at a higher tier. This is often called sponsorship in practice but can go by other names depending on the Collective's context, such as base supporters, members, etc.

Sponsors often represent companies with accounting and reporting needs. They may want brand exposure, access to or goodwill from a community, tangible benefits like support, or help with their recruiting efforts.

Supports a Collective financially, with a repeating or one-off contribution.

Individual Financial contributor can find a Collective in many ways:

• Direct link to a Collective

• Organization's page

Expense submitter

There are two different formats to contribute financially:

• One-time financial contribution

• Recurring financial contribution

Non-financial Contributors

Supporting Collectives by providing the legal and financial infrastructure needed to accept money and make payments.

An individual can contribute with code (software) to an open-source project with a Collective

An individual who contributes time or skills to a Collective's mission.

This section is our core. What our values are and our community guidelines.

The mission and values that underpin Open Collective.

Some rules that we all aim to follow and outline how we deal with situations

Mission

We are on a mission to enable communities to be sustainable and fundraise in full transparency without having to create a legal entity to do so.

Values

• Impact: we are not a neutral platform

• Collectivity: we are building collective power

• Inclusivity: we are here for many different kinds of people

• Honesty: we act with integrity

• Transparency: we are authentically and accessibly open

• Privacy: we respect individual privacy

• Dignity: we treat others with respect

• Sustainability and resilience: we are here for the long haul

The contain a deeper discussion of each of these values.

Interested in working at Open Collective? Check out our .

Every hiring process is different, and non-engineering/product positions often have a significantly different flow, but to get an insight into a past set of hiring processes, read on below.

~

Example Hiring process

Updated February 9th 2022

Screening 📺

General

Interested candidates are invited anytime to apply and write us a thoughtful message at any time. Simply dropping a CV is not enough, we want to see an appreciation of what we do and alignment with our values.

Once a week, we will look at current candidates and invite selected ones to the next stage. We, unfortunately, can't invite everyone, so if you don't make it to this stage and are still interested, please wait and contact us again in around ~3 months.

Product

Additionally, we want to see a history of working in a product capacity, perhaps on platforms like ours.

Engineering

To screen candidates, we also want to see a first contribution to our codebase as a PR in one of our GitHub projects. This can be anything but it needs to be mergeable. We suggest sticking to minimal complexity (a few minutes) to simple complexity (a few hours). This can be compensated through our Bounty program, with cash or gift card. If merged but there was no Bounty, we're happy to compensate at similar levels ($200 for simple complexity issues or $40 / hour)

From Screening to Test 👏

To formally meet and answer your questions, we'll schedule a short video call with the hiring manager. We'll assess your fit and try to figure out any blockers. To ensure a fit within the team we’ll schedule another call with one of the colleagues that you’ll be working alongside.

We regularly review new candidates and will invite selected ones to the next stage. We, unfortunately, can't invite everyone, so if you don't make it to this stage and are still interested, please wait and contact us again in around ~3 months.

Engineering

To formally meet and answer your questions, we'll schedule a short video call with our CTO. We'll assess your fit and try to figure out any blockers.

Test ⌛

For selected candidates, we would like you to complete a medium complexity task that you would typically perform as part of your role (~4 hours completion time):

You can make reasonable requests for information about our business in order to complete the assignment. You can collaborate with other team members. This will be compensated at the market rate/hour. This will be presented to and reviewed by both the hiring manager and a team member.

This test may be a pairing exercise, a product review, a solution design or some other task depending upon the role you are applying for.

From Test to Trial 🤔

Engineering

You'll have a call again with our CTO, we'll mutually assess if your test was a success. If it does, we'll start scheduling the next stage.

Trial 🤓

The final step is an invitation to spend a few days (2 to 5 days) working with the team. Thid will be on some sort of small project, or on various issues, pairing with others, and participating to daily calls. It is similarly compensated.

Concurrently, you will have a video call with one or more members of our leadership team and/or CEO.

Offer 🙌🎊

Lastly, if the trial is success, we will ask to continue working with you. (Celebrate!)

The Open Collective Documentation is our main documentation enabling all of our users to successfully use our platform.

We encourage our to link out to our main documentation for the basic how-to-use of Open Collective. We will also aim to link out to our fiscal host's documentation in specific areas to provide further information when needed.

If you are looking for more specific Fiscal Host Documentation, please head along to the links below.

FAQ

What's the status of your company?

We are an American based C corp registered in Delaware. We also have created other separate entities to act as ,

• for open source projects around the world.

Where are you based?

Our team works remotely around the world. Learn more about who works for Open Collective on our .

When did you start?

created the company in May 2015 and raised a first round of $500k in October 2015. and (). .

Can I see your company budget?

We run our company via ourselves. You can also see the .

How much investment have you raised?

We try to be very transparent about our own finances. We raised a total of $2,815,000 so far ($815k on convertible notes in 2015-2016, $2M Series Seed in June 2017).

How do I get in touch with you?

Open Collective supports initiatives that make a positive impact on the world. To accomplish this, the Open Collective community must be a welcoming and safe environment for many different kinds of people and activities, while living .

In addition to following the (which all platform users agree to, and which reference these guidelines), community participants are expected to act in accordance with these Community Guidelines, including all Collectives, Hosts, Organizations, Supporters, Contributors, Sponsors, and other users and community participants, as well as Open Collective staff. These guidelines apply not only within the confines of the platform, but throughout all the Open Collective community’s online and offline spaces.

Summary

We recommend reading this whole document, but here is a brief overview.

The Open Collective community strives to live :

• : we are not a neutral platform

• : we are building collective power

• : we are here for many different kinds of people

• : we act with integrity

• : we are authentically and accessibly open

• : we respect individual privacy

• : we treat others with respect

• : we are here for the long haul

Open Collective does not tolerate , , , or .

Our values

Impact

Open Collective exists to support people to raise money, build communities, and operate initiatives in service of positive impact on the world. We are not a neutral platform. We believe that technology, money, companies, and communication are interconnected and do not exist in an ethical vacuum. We expressly support those building a progressive, fair, just, sustainable, and healthy future.

Participants in the Open Collective community acknowledge their impact on individuals, communities, and the planet.

Collectivity

We believe that all humans are of equal worth and value, and that the tools needed to build a truly egalitarian society must be collective in nature. Thus, Open Collective is oriented toward collectivity and the commons, rather than individualism, competition, and hierarchies of human worth.

The Open Collective community sees a world of abundance, rather than scarcity. We share with one another and support one another whenever we are able, and we have a shared responsibility for the health and safety of the commons.

Inclusivity

Honesty

Open Collective community participants act with integrity. We are honest about who we are, what we are doing, what we plan to be doing, and why.

Transparency

Transparency is a huge part of the Open Collective community and a deeply held value. It sets us apart.

We define transparency as authentic and accessible openness, clarity, and visibility, free from deceit. Those who seek to scam or defraud will take advantage of the lack of transparency where they can, especially when money is involved. By managing money transparently on the Open Collective platform, we enable accountability, equity, and participation in our communities and ensure trust.

Privacy

Alongside Open Collective’s commitment to transparency, we also believe in privacy. The right to own your own identity and data is a core value that's been with the Open Collective community from the beginning. Individuals’ private personal information should never be made public or exploited without their consent. Open Collective will never sell community participants’ data.

The Open Collective team acknowledges the effort required to navigate the tension between privacy and transparency. We believe both are essential to making the world a better place. Often, people doing brave and important work have increased privacy-related risks. We strive to provide ways for community participants to protect their identity while still maintaining transparency and accountability. Working together, we can ensure that transparency and privacy are both used appropriately in alignment with our values.

Dignity

Open Collective community participants strive to treat others with dignity, civility, consideration, and respect. We always try to:

• Demonstrate empathy and kindness

• Be mindful of others’ time and capacity

• Give and accept constructive feedback

• Speak and act from our own experience

• Be aware of cultural and linguistic differences

Sustainability and resilience

The Open Collective community is here for the long haul. We are committed to community sustainability, including financial, collective, and individual sustainability. To achieve that mission, Open Collective itself must also be sustainable.

The Open Collective community is also resilient. Strong communities survive their founders. We build, share, and document such that other members of the community may carry on and lead in the future.

What is not allowed

Hate and discrimination

Open Collective does not tolerate hate and discrimination.

We strongly encourage the use of the platform to change society for the better in relation to topics such as ability, age, body size, caste, class, color, education, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, immigration status, language, level of experience, mental and physical health, national origin, nationality, neurotype, occupation, personal appearance, race, religion, socio-economic status, sex, or sexual identity and orientation.

Open Collective does not tolerate acts (including speech) that attack, degrade, exclude, subjugate, marginalize, express hatred, or unfairly discriminate against a person or group of people on the basis of these characteristics.

Bullying and harassment

Open Collective does not tolerate bullying or harassment.

This includes any habitual badgering or intimidation targeted at a specific person or group of people, whether it takes place directly or by influencing others, not only within the confines of our platform, but throughout the community’s online and offline spaces and beyond. In general, if your actions are unwanted and you continue to engage in them, there's a good chance you are headed into bullying or harassment territory.

Misinformation and disinformation

Open Collective does not tolerate the support or promotion of information that is inaccurate or false (misinformation), or intentionally deceptive (disinformation), where such content is likely to result in harm to the public or to interfere with equitable opportunities for all. For example, we do not allow content that may put the well-being of groups of people at risk or limit their ability to take part in a free and open society. This includes medical and scientific misinformation, such as unfounded or debunked theories that argue against broadly supported public health measures related to pandemics or climate change.

Disrupting the experience of others

Being part of a community includes recognizing how your actions affect others and engaging in meaningful and productive interactions. Behaviors such as spamming, scamming, fraud, impersonation, dishonesty, unsolicited or unauthorized self-promotion, repeatedly posting off-topic materials, or using any platform feature in a way that continually disrupts the experience of other users is not allowed.

Explicit Content

We do not host, support, or otherwise engage with providers and purveyors of explicit content.

What happens if someone breaks the rules

Reporting violations

Reports may be submitted by the target of the violation, as well as third parties. As much as possible, the source of any report will be kept confidential from all parties except those involved in enforcement decisions.

Proactive maintenance

We proactively review questionable activity using the tools available to us. Not all enforcement actions will be the result of a report from a community participant.

Actions we may take

We review each report on a case-by-case basis and tailor our response to the situation, using these guidelines and accounting as much as we can for our biases. We do not take these actions lightly and welcome feedback.

• Removing content

• Removing and refunding contributions

• Canceling transactions

• Freezing account features or removing permissions

After investigation and review, further actions may include:

• Closing or un-hosting Collectives

• Archiving accounts or removing users

Moderation by admins

Admins have the ability to moderate their communities using certain tools:

• Marking expenses as spam

• Deleting expense comments

• Deleting Update comments

• Removing other admins

• Creating their own community guidelines (which may augment, but not supersede, these guidelines)

Fiscal Hosts can reject applications from Collectives that don’t align with their mission or principles, apply their policies when paying out expenses, and freeze Collectives while investigating potential issues.

Moderators should communicate reasons for moderation decisions when appropriate.

Fiscal Hosts

Fiscal Hosts are encouraged to make provisions in their legal agreements with Collectives so that in the event of significant enforcement actions by Open Collective, the Host may also end their relationship with the Collective. We wish to support Fiscal Hosts to develop their own approaches to community building and moderation, in alignment with these guidelines.

The consequences of these guidelines necessitate cooperation with Fiscal Hosts in many cases, and information and decision-making will be shared with them where appropriate. The Open Collective team will work with Fiscal Hosts to ensure that enforcement actions occur as smoothly as possible for all parties.

Appeal and reinstatement

Open Collective understands that everyone is more than the worst thing they’ve ever done. Community participants who have violated the Terms and/or Community Guidelines may have the opportunity to continue to be part of the Open Collective community if they're able to address the harm they've done and restore trust. We also recognize that such an approach could be taken advantage of by “bad actors.”

Reinstatement to the Open Collective community and platform will be done in consultation with a Collective’s Fiscal Host where applicable. Reinstatement of a formerly hosted Collective does not guarantee the reinstatement with that Fiscal Host.

Evolution of these guidelines

These guidelines are influenced by the guidelines and policies of many organizations, including GitHub, Patreon, Fractured Atlas, p5.js, and Drupal Diversity and Inclusion, as well as projects such as the Contributor Covenant and the Citizen Code of Conduct, along with guidance and feedback from diverse members of the Open Collective community.

Open Collective is an online funding platform for open and transparent communities. We provide the tools to raise and share your finances in full transparency.

This is the place to find all help and documentation related to Open Collective.

Find your way to the right section/page

Using our search bar

Use the search bar on the top right to search for specific words or phrases:

Browsing sections

Use the menu bar on the lefthand side of the screen to browse the various pages.

We are always open to suggested changes, so please feel free to give us feedback!

Collectives

A page to tell the world about your project and engage supporters.

Raise Money

Accept donations and sponsorship.

Pay Expenses

Reimburse expenses and pay invoices.

Transparent Budget

Automatic financial reporting and accountability.

Tiers

Levels or rewards for supporters and sponsors.

Events

Ticket sales go straight to your Collective budget.

Gift Cards

Give the gift of giving.

Organizations

Sponsor Collectives on behalf of a company.

Updates

Keep your supporters in the loop about your achievements and news.

Fiscal Hosting

Create an umbrella entity to support a community of Collectives.

Profiles

Tell the world who you are and show off the Collectives you're managing or supporting.

Conversations

A community forum for your Collective.

We did a first pre-seed round of $500k in October 2015 (deck, SAFE, $5M cap) with:

• $250k General Catalyst (SF/NYC/Boston, Hemant Taneja)

• $50k Jonathan Siegel (can't pin down his location)

• $50k Belcube (Brussels)

• $50k Tony Jamous (London, Nexmo)

• $25k Eric Nadalin (London, Nexmo)

• $25k Brian Larson (SF, engineer at Google, Twitter)

• $15k Guillermo Rauch (SF/Buenos Aires, socket.io)

• $10k Dries Buytaert (Boston, Drupal)

• $10k Underscore.vc (Boston)

• $5k Toon Vanagt (Brussels, data.be)

• $5k Xavier Corman (Brussels, Edebex)

• $5k Personal friend

We did a follow-up round of $315k in July 2016 (SAFE, $8M cap) with:

• $100k Ricardo Gorodisch (Argentina, President Foundation Kaleidos)

• $50k Pete Koomen (SF, Cofounder/CTO Optimizely)

• $25k Jim Payne (NYC, Cofounder MoPub, EIR Accel Partners)

• $25k Caesar Sengupta (Bay Area, VP Product Management at Google)

• $20k Gautam Gandhi (India, Entrepreneur, former Head New Business Development India at Google)

• $15k Tom Brown (FinTech lawyer, partner at Paul Hastings, former VP at Visa )

• $15k Sam De Brouwer (SF, TEDxSanFrancisco)

• $15k Vadim (NYC/Bay Area/Buenos Aires)

• $10k John Kobs (SF, Entrepreneur/CEO at ApartmentList)

• $10k Nicolas Wittenborn (Berlin, principal at point 9 venture)

• $10k Derek Parham (NYC, deputy CTO at Hillary For America)

• $10k Henry Bridge (NYC, Director of Product at Hillary For America)

• $10k Antoine Perdaens (Belgium, Cofounder/CEO at KnowledgePlaza)

We did a Series Seed lead by Bloomberg Beta in June 2017 ($9M pre valuation, Term Sheet, Stock Investment Agreement), including:

• $1M James Cham, Roy Bahat, Karin Klein (Bloomberg Beta)

• $350k Angel list syndicate lead by Dave Eisenberg and Nadia Eghbal

• $200k Nicholas Chirls (Notation Capital)

• $150k Dave Eisenberg

• $100k Semil Shah (Haystack.vc)

• $40k Armin Steuernagel (Purpose.ag)

• $35k Ramy Adeeb (1984.vc)

• $25k John Kobs (SF, Entrepreneur/CEO at ApartmentList)

• $25k Randy Reddig (Square)

• $25k Noah Weiss

• $20k Jack Herrick (WikiHow.com)

• $10k Kyle Wild (Keen.io)

• $10k Sam Gerstenzang

• $10k David King

1. Overview

Open Collective is a platform used by individuals (contributors, expense submitters), Collectives, and Fiscal Hosts to transparently manage financial resources. Because Open Collective is an ecosystem of various actors with their own policies and regulations, this refund policy only stands in the case that the contribution recipient does not already have their own refund policy. We empower Collectives and Fiscal Hosts to approve and set their own policies about refunds. It is required that you reach out to the Collective or Fiscal Host that you contributed to directly if you would like to request a refund. We will rarely issue refunds on their behalf. Please only reach out to the team at Open Collective, Inc., if deemed necessary (see “Communication/Initiating Refunds” ).

1. Type of Product or Service:

Open Collective has the technical ability to process refunds for the following:

• One-off financial contributions via Stripe and PayPal

• Recurring financial contributions via Stripe (including SEPA, ACH, BACS bank transfer) and PayPal.

• Added funds and manual bank transfers (This will only reverse the transaction on Open Collective, the Fiscal Host will need to ensure the refund is issued manually).

• Platform tips

• Event tickets

• Balance transfers

Refunds via Open Collective are not possible for:

• Expenses (Invoices/Reimbursements/Grants). Please coordinate with the expense payer or payee regarding the return of any expense.

1. Common Valid Reasons for Refund Requests:

• Mistaken or accidental donations

• Double charges

• Unmet expectations of agreed-upon products or services

• Cancelled events

• Cancelled subscriptions

• Changes in circumstances or financial difficulties

• Payment schedule issues

• Incorrect amount

1. Timeframe:

If the Fiscal Host has enabled Collectives the ability to process refunds. They will be able to do this for up to 30 days after the transaction date. In order to refund manual bank transfers collective admins will need to contact their Fiscal Host.

Fiscal Hosts do not have a time restraint in which they can process refunds. We encourage Fiscal Hosts to establish their own refund policy.

Open Collective Support does not have a time restraint in which they can process refunds. We will always default to the Fiscal Host’s refund policy. We also must abide by third party payment refund policies and technical limitations like credit card expiry dates. Open Collective support can not refund funds contributed through a method not on the Open Collective platform e.g manual bank transfer

The processing time for the refund will vary depending on approval and action from a number of third parties including payment method (bank transfer, Stripe, etc.) and parties involved (Collectives and Fiscal Hosts). Typically, refunds are processed within 5-7 working days.

1. Conditions for Refunds:

• Refunds cannot be processed for archived or deleted Collectives or Fiscal Hosts.

• We are unable to process partial refunds, this includes contributions that include platform tips.

• In the event that a refund is being requested from Open Collective without the approval of the recipient, the refund requester must provide proof that they sought permission from the recipient and must provide a valid reason for why they are seeking a refund.

1. Refund Methods:

If a refund is issued via the Open Collective platform, the money will be returned via the original payment method.

If the funds were sent via a payment method not connected to Open Collective e.g. a bank account, the Fiscal Host will need to manually reverse the transaction, the Open Collective team is not able to refund these sorts of transactions.

1. Fees and Costs:

Open Collective does not charge additional fees for refunds; however, the person requesting a refund may incur additional costs from the payment provider.

1. Communication/Initiating a Refund:

• Individuals seeking refunds should first contact the Collective and/or the Fiscal Host directly. If necessary Open Collective can help direct them to their contact details.

• If Open Collective receives a request for a refund, without evidence that you have reached out to the recipient, we will redirect the requester to contact the recipient directly.

• In special circumstances, such as not being able to contact/consult with the recipient or needing to disputing a decision, individuals can get in contact with Open Collective here.

• If we deem it acceptable to issue a refund without consulting with the recipient, Open Collective will reach out to the recipient to let them know that a refund has been issued.

• Please include the following details about your refund request:

  • The amount

  • The date the transaction occurred

  • A link to the contribution

  • Prior communication with the recipient

1. 3rd Party Considerations:

• Open Collective exists in collaboration with a number of other parties including payment processors, Collectives, and Fiscal Hosts, that may or may not have their own refund policies. As described in the overview above, Collective and Fiscal Host refund policies take precedence over Open Collective’s refund policy.

• We recommend reading the relevant policies and documentation of our payment processors as this will influence all parties’ ability to offer a refund. Examples include the following:

  • Stripe documentation: “Refunds“

    • Note: We are not able to process refunds to expired credit cards.

  • PayPal documentation: “How do I get a refund?”

    • Collective administrators and refunders may also refer to “Refund Payments for Individual Transactions”

1. Review and Update:

We may periodically review and update our refund policy. To ensure that you have the latest information, be sure to return to this page.

Examples of Fiscal Host refund policies: Open Source Collective

Open Collective Europe

View our Roadmap updates on our Github

Key questions for prioritization

This is what we ask ourselves to decide what gets done and what doesn't.

• Does this serve our mission?

• Will this help to make us financially sustainable within a year?

• Can this make us move faster?

• Does this increase quality?

• Does this add technical debt?

• Is it feasible to build and maintain with our current team and runway?

• What insight or research is this project based on?

• Is this problem already solved elsewhere?

• How will we measure our success? Do we have a baseline today that we can compare this against?

• How well do we understand the complexity of the problem, feature to be added or user needs to be addressed?

• What is the estimated timeframe for delivering this project?

Template for new projects

• Github issue

  • explains the feature.

  • Link to other opened issues or data.

  • Include details below.

• Kickoff

  • Organize a special meeting or a scheduled one.

• Project owner.

  • Role: Facilitator, decision-maker, producer.

  • It's ultimately responsible for (needs to do or organize who does)

    • Delivery

    • Q&A

    • Docs & Comms

    • Post-ship plan for maintenance

• Success metric(s)

• Timeframe - kickoff and delivery, main milestones/roadmap

Collectives can receive contributions from all over the world via credit card, in any currency.

Donation amounts will be denominated in the currency of the Collective's Fiscal Host, which can be set up in the following currencies (so far):

• Argentine Peso - ARS

• Australian Dollar - AUD

• Bangladeshi Taka - BDT

• Bulgarian Lev - BGN

• Brazilian Real - BRL

• Canadian Dollar - CAD

• Swiss Franc - CHF

• Czech Koruna - CZK

• Danish Krone - DKK

• Euro - EUR

• Pound sterling - GBP

• Hong Kong Dollar - HKD

• Croatian Kuna - HRK

• Hungarian Forint - HUF

• Indian Rupee - INR

• Icelandic Króna - ISK

• Japanese Yen - JPY

• Mexican Peso - MXN

• Malaysian Ringgit - MYR

• Nigerian Naira - NGN

• Norwegian Krone - NOK

• Nepalese Rupee - NPR

• New Zealand Dollar- NZD

• Poland złoty - PLN

• Romanian Leu - RON

• Swedish Krona - SEK

• Singapore Dollar - SGD

• Ukrainian hryvnia - UAH

• United States Dollar - USD

• Uruguayan Peso - UYU

• South African Rand - ZAR

The currency a Fiscal Host supports is determined by the currency used by their Stripe account. If you'd like to chance the currency on your OC Fiscal Host, please check the primary currency of the Stripe account and change it there. If this doesn't work or you're having issues, please contact us.

When you log in to your account, you will be automtically directed to your Open Collective Dashboard.

Our Dashboard is a space which helps you complete all your tasks on Open Collective, whether you’re acting as an individual or an admin of a larger group.

Navigating your Dashboard

When you first arrive, your Dashboard will be set to your personal account. This will show you a range of tasks that you can perform with this account.

These include:

• Searching recent activity relating to your account

• Viewing and tracking expenses you have submitted

• Viewing contributions you have made on the platform

• Changing your account settings, such as your email address, security info, and so on

You can use the search bar in the top right-hand corner to search for Collectives or Fiscal Hosts on the platform, or click the megaphone for the latest updates from Open Collective.

You can also click your profile photo in the top right corner to bring up additional account settings, including:

• Viewing your profile

• Selecting preview features

• Navigating the Open Collective homepage, docs or support pages

Switching between profiles

If you click on the button in the top menu with your "personal account” profile image on it, you will find a list of all the roles you hold on Open Collective (if any).

This allows you to switch your Dashboard to other roles, such as:

• An admin of a Collective

• An admin of an organization

• An admin of a Fiscal Host

This will change the menu to show options that are relevant to the tasks you need to do in that role.

Our Preview Features menu offers you a selection of upcoming features and layout changes - which you can choose and test before they are fully launched.

Activating (and deactivating) preview features

You can choose which features or updates you want to try.

To find and choose features:

1. Login to the platform using your account

2. Click on the profile icon on the top-right corner

3. Find the Preview Features option on the menu

4. Select the features that appeal to you, and switch them on using the toggle button

The feature preview will be enabled on your account by clicking the button. If you want to change back, toggle the switch off again and your interface will revert to the original state.

The features available in the preview features menu may vary depending on the type of role you hold on the platform. For example, admins may see different options for individual users.

Improving preview features

Every feature in the Preview Features menu is at the stage where we feel happy showing it to users. However, they are all beta releases, so we are keen to hear from you about any improvements you’d like to see.

If you want us to change or fix any part of the feature you are currently previewing, please get in touch via the link in the menu box itself or by contacting us.

Last Updated: 7 January 2019

This Privacy Policy explains how information about you is collected, used, and disclosed by Open Collective, Inc. ("Open Collective" or “we”). This Privacy Policy applies to information we collect when you use our websites and online services (collectively, the “Services”) or when you otherwise interact with us.

We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make changes, we will notify you by revising the date at the top of the policy and, in some cases, we may provide you with additional notice (such as adding a statement to our homepage or sending you a notification). We encourage you to review the Privacy Policy whenever you access the Services or otherwise interact with us to stay informed about our information practices and the ways you can help protect your privacy.

Collection of Information

Information You Provide to Us

We collect the information you provide directly to us. For example, we collect information when you create an account, participate in any interactive features of the Services, fill out a form, make a payment, request customer support or otherwise communicate with us. The types of information we may collect include your name, email address, payment method information and any other information you choose to provide.

Information We Collect Automatically

When You Use the Services When you access or use our Services, we automatically collect information about you, including:

• Log Information: We collect log information about your use of the Services, including the type of browser you use, access times, pages viewed, your IP address and the page you visited before navigating to our Services.

• Information Collected by Cookies and Other Tracking Technologies: We use various technologies to collect information, including cookies, local storage and web beacons. Cookies are small data files stored on your hard drive or in device memory that help us improve our Services and your experience, see which areas and features of our Services are popular and count visits. Local Storage similarly enables our Services to store data (like login tokens) securely in your browser and unlike cookies, it's not sent to the server on every request. Web beacons are electronic images that may be used in our Services or emails and help deliver cookies, count visits and understand usage and campaign effectiveness. For more information about cookies, and how to disable them, please see "Your Choices" below.

Information We Collect From Other Sources

We may also obtain information from other sources. For example, if you connect your account with an account you have with a third-party service (such as GitHub), we will have access to certain information from that service, such as your profile information, in accordance with the authorization procedures determined by that service. Additionally, we may collect information about you from third-party sources that help us to learn more about you, like for example your profile picture or social media handles.

Use of Information

We may use information about you for various purposes, including to:

• Provide, maintain and improve our Services, and develop new products and services;

• Provide and deliver the products and services you request,

• Send you notices, updates, and support and administrative messages;

• Communicate with you about products, services, offers, promotions, rewards, and events offered by Open Collective and others, and provide news and information we think will be of interest to you;

• Monitor and analyze trends, usage and activities in connection with our Services;

• Detect, investigate and prevent fraudulent transactions and other illegal activities and protect the rights and property of Open Collective and others;

• Personalize and improve the Services and provide, content or features that match user profiles or interests;

• Facilitate contests, sweepstakes and promotions and process and deliver entries and rewards;

• Link or combine with information we collect about you; and

• Carry out any other purpose described to you at the time the information was collected.

Sharing of Information

We may share information about you as follows or as otherwise described in this Privacy Policy:

• With hosts and organizers of a collective, if you are a contributor, or request reimbursement for expenses made in support, of that collective

• We will share your name and image with GitHub if you participate in a collective that is also working on a software project through GitHub.

• With vendors, consultants and other service providers who need access to such information to carry out work on our behalf. If you submit a request to us, we will provide you with a list of the third-party service providers with which we have shared information about you for the 12 months prior to your request;

• In response to a request for information if we believe disclosure is in accordance with or required by, any applicable law, regulation or legal process;

• If we believe your actions are inconsistent with our user agreements or policies, or to protect the rights, property and safety of Open Collective or others;

• In connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of Open Collective assets, financing or acquisition of all or a portion of our business by another Open Collective;

• With your consent or at your direction.

• We may also share aggregated or de-identified information, which cannot reasonably be used to identify you.

Social Sharing Features

The Services may offer social sharing features and other integrated tools, which let you share actions you take on our Services with other media, and vice versa. Your use of such features enables the sharing of information with your friends or the public, depending on the settings you establish with the entity that provides the social sharing feature. For more information about the purpose and scope of data collection and processing in connection with social sharing features, please visit the privacy policies of the entities that provide these features.

Analytics Services Provided by Others

We engage other companies to provide analytics services via the Services. These companies may use cookies, web beacons, device identifiers and other technologies to collect information about your use of the Services and other websites and applications, including your IP address, web browser, mobile network information, pages viewed, time spent on pages or in apps, links clicked and conversion information. This information may be used by Open Collective and others to, among other things, analyze and track data, determine the popularity of certain content, and better understand how our services are being used.

Security

Open Collective takes reasonable measures to help protect information about you from loss, theft, misuse and unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration and destruction.

Transfer of Information to the U.S. and Other Countries

Open Collective is based in the United States and the information we collect is governed by U.S. law. By accessing or using the Services or otherwise providing information to us, you consent to the processing, transfer and storage of information in and to the U.S. and other countries, where you may not have the same rights and protections as you do under local law.

Your Choices

Account Information

You may update the profile information you provide by logging into your online account.

Cookies

Most web browsers are set to accept cookies by default. If you prefer, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject browser cookies. Please note that if you choose to remove or reject cookies, this could affect the availability and functionality of our Services.

Promotional Communications

You may opt out of receiving promotional or notification emails from Open Collective by following the instructions in those emails. If you opt out, we may still send you non-promotional emails, such as those about your account or our ongoing business relations.

GDPR

Open Collective is GDPR compliant. We are not in the business of selling data to any 3rd party. Our business model is to take a commission on the money raised by Collectives (like most other crowdfunding platforms). Companies that sponsor Collectives don't get access to private information. Only the admins of the Collective (core contributors) and of the organization that is legally hosting the Collectives (fiscal sponsor) get access to your email address. We don't store credit card information on our servers (we only store a token if you have decided to save it to your profile). We don’t store any passwords. Since our entire code base is open source, anyone can easily audit it.

Data Removal

If you haven't made any transactions, you can easily delete your profile account on Open Collective from the settings. If your profile or collective has transactions, we can't delete them since we need to keep the integrity of our ledger and accounting system.

For individual/organizations profiles: please contact us and please request for your personal information to be removed and the transaction(s) anonymized.

For collectives, follow these steps.

Pia Mancini

Co-founder & CEO Madrid, Spain

Twitter, LinkedIn

François Hodierne

Chief Technology Officer Berlin, Germany

Twitter, GitHub, Linkedin

Benjamin Nickolls

Chief Product Officer Shropshire, United Kingdom

Twitter, GitHub, Linkedin

Ronen Hirsch

Product Manager Israel

Website, Twitter, Linkedin

Benjamin Piouffle

Software Engineer La Ciotat, France

Twitter, GitHub, Linkedin

Leo Kewitz

Software Engineer Madrid, Spain

GitHub, Linkedin

Gustav Larsson

Software Engineer Gothenburg - Sweden

Github, Linkedin, Website

Henrique Silva

Software Engineer São Paulo - Brazil

Github, Linkedin

Amina Kazi

Designer Navi Mumbai, India

Linkedin

Shannon Wray

Operations, Orchestrator Remote

Linkedin

Sudharaka Palamakumbura

Software Designer Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Linkedin

Kadallah Burrowes

Support

Remote

Linkedin

Advisors

Xavier Damman

Founder Brussels, Belgium

Twitter, LinkedIn

Team Map

This map shows the diversity of our team and the truly global approach it takes to bring you Open Collective.

Our team is distributed between Berlin, Edinburgh, Florianopolis, Guadalajara, La Ciotat, New York, Madrid, Paris, Shropshire, Navi Mumbai, Vancouver and Wellington.

English, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, Russian, Japanese, French and German are just some of the languages spoken by our team.

Click here to view the interactive map.

Need Assistance?

• Browse our Help Topics or Search these Docs (🔎 in the upper right corner)

• Contact us here: Please include links & screenshots!

In Discord

• Join our Discord to reach the OC Team and the wider community

• Feel free to introduce yourself or post content related to Open Collective in #general. We encourage you to mention your collective or fiscal host in your profile so that other members can easily connect with you.

• Fiscal Host Specific Channels - If you’re hosted by one of our larger fiscal hosts, you can join a dedicated channel to ask questions and share information:

  • #opensource - Open Source Collective

  • #oc-europe - Open Collective Europe

• Are you a Fiscal Host admin? Join #fiscal-hosts

• If you need support or have questions about Open Collective, reach out to our #community-support channel or read our documentation. If you need to share any private information, talk to our Support team here.

• Feel free to share any #news or #events, and engage with our #engineering team

• Check out our Community Guidelines to learn more about how we all maintain a welcoming and inclusive atmosphere. You can report any issues by messaging @moderators directly or sending an email to support.

Contact a specific Fiscal Host or Collective?

• Visit their Open Collective page, and click the small envelope below their name or the contact button on the right-hand side.

• Contact Open Source Collective

• Contact Open Collective Europe

Find Us Elsewhere

• Github

• Twitter

• Blog

• LinkedIn

• Mastodon

• Youtube

• Facebook

• Instagram

Introduction

At the heart of Open Collective is a ledger that records all the financial activities that take place on the platform. The ledger is our source of truth. It is the foundation that makes possible crowdfunding contributions, added funds, grants and expenses. All these financial interactions generate transactions that are recorded in the ledger.

Most users interact with the ledger indirectly by making contributions and submitting expenses and for most users that is enough. However, as the platform has grown, larger organizations who rely on the platform, primarily fiscal hosts and medium-to-large collectives, need to use information from the platform for accounting purposes. In response to these needs we are making the ledger itself more visible, accessible and legible to users.

Immutability

The transparency at Open Collective relies on the ledger to be a trustworthy source of information. Therefore, transactions on the ledger cannot be modified. Transactions can only be added to the ledger. There are rare cases where platform support does intervene in the ledger to:

1. Mark a transaction as deleted - the transaction is not really deleted, it still exists in the ledger, however it is marked as deleted and is no longer included in calculations and will not appear in transactions lists or exports.

2. Reassign a transaction to a different account. The transactions itself is not modified but the account to which it is related can be changed.

When are transactions generated?

Transactions are generated either when:

1. Via the platform: financial transactions are confirmed via payment processors:

   1. A contribution is successfully charged and confirmed by a payment processor (such as Paypal, or credit cards via Stripe).

   2. A contribution is refunded.

   3. An expense is successfully paid through a payment processor (such as Wise or Paypal).

   4. An expense is marked as unpaid (when payment does not reach its destination).

2. Off the platform: financial transactions that occurred off platform are documented on the platform.

   1. A fiscal host adds (see Added Funds) funds that have arrived in their bank accounts and assigns them to their designated collective.

   2. Off platform (manually paid) expenses are documented on the platform by fiscal hosts.

3. Inside the platform: money is moved between collective accounts within the same fiscal host.

Accessing the Ledger

The ledger can be accessed:

What makes Open Collective different?

• Full transparency of where your money comes from and where it goes.

• Completely open-source.

• Designed for ongoing collaborative communities, not individual creators or one-off campaigns.

• Offers Fiscal Hosting as a service, so projects don't need to legally incorporate or figure out taxes.

Our product overlaps in some ways with crowdfunding sites, fiscal sponsorship service providers, and accounting software. But we're the only platform that combines all three.

While crowdfunding is based on time-limited campaigns, Open Collective is designed for long term support of ongoing projects and initiatives. Instead of throwing your money in a black box and hoping for the best, Open Collective has full transparency, so everyone can see where the money comes from and where it goes.

Fiscal sponsorship has been a pretty niche service limited mainly to the charity sector, where existing nonprofits will hold grants for unincorporated projects. Open Collective brings this concept to every other sector and supercharges it with a tech platform that radically lowers overhead for fiscal sponsors (no more messy spreadsheets!), so they can support more projects and empowers sponsees to see and manage their money directly, alongside features for fiscal management best practice.

Open Collective is not a fully-featured accounting platform, but it offers key features for budget tracking and expense management and payment. One feature we offer that most accounting software doesn't is integrated payments for expenses, via Paypal or bank transfer. It means projects don't have to step into the complexity of a full-fledged accounting tool in order to do basic budget tracking and good money management.

Can you use Open Collective with other services?

You can combine Patreon and Open Collective, check out this great step by step guide.

First, thank you for considering contributing to Open Collective! It's people like you that make this such a great community. We welcome any type of contribution, not only code.

Check out our Roadmap for the latest priorities.

You can help with:

Quality Assurance

File bug reports, the more details you can give the better

Internationalization

Translate Open Collective's interface!

Documentation

Suggest changes to this documentation!

Marketing

If you would like to share something with the marketing team please join our Discord and post on the #news channel.

Write blog posts and share success stories! We offer a $100 blog bounty to any Collective who wants to tell their story. Please contact us if you're interested.

Design

Coming soon!

Code

There are always plenty of open issues! We also have Bounties.

Feature ideas

Raise an issue with your suggestion!

Peer Support

Answer questions on our Discord!

Code Contributions

Unsure where to begin contributing to Open Collective? You can start by looking through the good first issueslabel, which should only require a few lines of code, and a test or two.

Want to get paid for contributing code? Check out our bounty program.

General guidelines

• The strings must be internationalized. See /help/developers/translations

• Whenever it's possible we must use styled-components to write styles. See OC Styleguide

• Icons must be imported from the styled-icons library.

• Tests written with Cypress must follow our good practices conventions.

Code review process

The bigger the pull request, the longer it will take to review and merge. Try to break down large pull requests into smaller chunks. If it's a bug fix, it will probably be quickly merged and deployed. If it's a new feature, it will need more testing and review.

Open Collective works primarily as a passwordless system. We generally think it's better to not force users to set a password, as it can actually be a security threat (more details below).

However, users are able to later set a password and sign in with it. In that case, the use of a password manager is recommended.

How passwordless works

You type in your email and the system instantly knows if you're an existing user or a new user.

If you already have an account, we send you an email with a unique link that logs you into Open Collective. You will stay logged in for 30 days on that device.

If you're a new user, you'll be prompted to create an account.

How it works with a password

As a user willing to set a password, you can do so from the "Security" section of your personal "Settings".

When signing in, after entering your email, you will simply be prompted for your password.

If you don't have your password available, there are two alternatives:

• Send me an email: it works the same as an account without password.

• Reset my password: you will receive an email to help you set a new password.

About security

It might sound counterintuitive, but passwords don’t always make things more secure. They can be hard to remember, and easy for fraudsters to guess. Not everyone uses a password manager, and people often don’t follow good password practices and either reuse passwords, or pick obvious ones (ie. their country code, their birthday, etc). Passwords can also make you more vulnerable to phishing, a type of fraud where someone tricks you into telling them your password.

Most websites allow you to reset your password by email, a feature fraudsters can use to work around any protection provided by a password. These websites start from the premise that if your email is compromised, your account will be too. The main way to avoid that is Two Factor Authentication (2FA), which you can enable on your Open Collective account. We don't send 2FA codes to mobile phones, we rely on OTP apps like Google Authenticator.

According to Auth0:

Passwordless authentication, by its nature, eliminates the problem of using an unsafe password. This means that one of the biggest user errors is taken out of your login. Not only is passwordless authentication safe to use, it might even be safer than a traditional username + password login.

In 2020, this login system was audited by Cure53. Their report included recommendations for improving it, but they found no critical issue nor design issue about the way it works today.

Our login system is also covered by our security bounty policy; we invite security researchers (and pay them) to try to break our system and improve it.

Who else uses magic links to login?

• Slack - a messaging app

• Monzo - a banking app

• Scaleway - hosting service (similar to Amazon AWS)

• Sweep Bright - a CRM

• Notion - a notes app

Your profile

You can use your Open Collective user profile to let people know a bit about you. Projects you back might want to reach out to you, or you may want to use this page to show off your contributions or the Collectives you manage.

You can access your profile settings by using the dropdown menu on your username and going to the Profile page.

On your Profile page, you are able to customize the following:

Cover image

The optimal size for a cover image is 2736x650.

Click on Edit cover to access to upload a new cover image.

After uploading an image, you are able to adjust it as you wish by either moving it and zooming in and out.

Main color

You can either choose any of the preset colors, add your own custom color or reset to the default color.

User Settings

To modify other profile information, click on the gear icon next to your profile image.

Here you can edit basic info such as Display Name, Legal Name, Company, Short description and Handle. Add your Currency and Tags, Social Links and your Location.

Access other settings such as Profile Page, Payment Methods, Payment Receipts, Gift Cards, Webhooks, Authorised Apps, Two-factor authentication, For developers and Advanced.

Advanced settings

Changing your email address

Go to Advanced and specify your new email address in the box under the Email address section. You'll get a confirmation, and then your new email will be active.

Deleting your account

To delete your account, go to the Delete this Account section and click on Delete this account.

Archiving your account

If your account has a history of transactions, your only option is archiving your account. Archived accounts will appear as inactive accounts and no new activity will be allowed. The next time subscriptions are due to be renewed (1st of the month), they will be cancelled.

To archive your account, go to the Archive this Account section and click on Archive this account.

Using Open Collective Anonymously

We understand that not everyone can or wants to show their real name on public Collective budgets.

If you are getting paid through the platform, we will need some personally identifiable information. Including your legal name. We will also need some documents, invoices and tax forms, these documents are not availably to the public, only admins of Collectives you work withwill be able to see them.

Adding Your Legal Name

Your legal name identifies you to admins of Collectives you work with, to Hosts of Collectives you work with and some staff at Open Collective Inc. the company that operates the Open Collective platform. You can add your legal name to your profile alongside your Display name. These are both editable in your User Settings

Update/Change your Email

Head to your User Settings, either via the settings button on your profile or in the user menu.

Go to the Advanced Section

Update/Change your email and click the save button

Open Collective provides some tools to make sure that disrespectful users and abusive contents don't have their place in your community. The moderation is done based on our .

Especially, these types of contents are never welcome on the website:

• Spam or unwanted commercial content

• Abusive or inappropriate language

• Irrelevant or erroneous content

How to report abusive content

Please send all your reports for spam and abusive content .

Limited user account

Limiting user's account is currently our main tool to prevent activity from malicious users. We usually limit an account after spotting one or multiple attempts at spamming or doing malicious things.

When you're account is limited you'll be unable to complete any sensitive action on the website, including:

• Create/edit expenses

• Make financial contributions

• Create conversations

If your account gets limited by mistake, you can .

Browse the Open Collective Ledger with the Dashboard Transactions tool. We have designed it to look and operate more similar to a 'bank statement.

To view the Transactions page navigate to your Dashboard and then Transactions. Utilize the account switcher to switch between accounts.

In the transactions table you can see the Date and Time of the transaction, the account, the Recipient/Sender, the Kind of transaction and the Net amount with the Currency.

Contextual Transactions

The transactions you see are based on the context in which you are using the tool.

1. If you are individual you will see transactions that are related only to you (expenses you submitted and contributions you made.

2. If you are a collective administrator you will see all the transactions that are related to the collective (all the added funds, contributions made to the collective and expenses submitted to the collective, payment processor and host fees).

3. If you are a fiscal host administrator you will see all of your organizational transactions and all the transactions related to the collectives you host.

Related transactions

Hovering over individual transactions will bring up a blue line to the left. This indicates the groupings of transactions.

Multiple transactions occur from the initial transaction for example based off the below screenshot

• Guest donates $5 to Logseq

This triggers

• Logseq sends a 74 cent in payment processor fees to Paypal

• Logseq sends a 50 cent fiscal host fee to Open Source Collective

• Open Source Collective receives a 50 cent fiscal host fee from Logseq

• Open Source Collective sends a 25 cent platform share to Open Collective

• Open Collective receives a 25 cent platform share from Open Source Collective

Sort

Sort the transactions either by Date (Oldest - Newset) or Effective Date (Oldest - Newest)

View more information

To dive in and review any particular transaction, click to trigger a draw to slide out from the right displaying more information.

• Transaction #

• Account

• Sender/Recipient

• Date and Time

• Effective Date

• Type of Transaction

• Kind of Transaction

• Amount

• Payment Method

• Merchant ID

• Accounting Category

• Group ID

• Opposite transaction ID

• Related contribution

Export CSV

Extra features for Fiscal Hosts

Transactions for hosted collectives are included in the 'All' transactions view you can use the tabs to only view transactions from the hosted collectives or the fiscal host

Transaction Fields

These additional fields have been deprecated but may still apply to older transaction records:

Transaction Kinds

Each transaction is of a single “kind.” The following are the "kinds" of transactions:

Vulnerability disclosure and reward program

We believe that no technology is perfect and that working with skilled security researchers is crucial in identifying weaknesses. Our bounty program is a way to reward the security researchers that help us with this task. We also publish to document issues once they are fixed.

If you believe you’ve discovered a bug in Open Collective’s security, please get in touch at . We will respond as quickly as possible to your report. We request that you not publicly disclose the issue until it has been addressed by Open Collective.

We investigate legitimate reports and make every effort to quickly resolve vulnerabilities. To encourage responsible reporting, we will not take legal action against researchers nor ask law enforcement to investigate them providing they comply with and more generally with the following guideline: Make a good faith effort to avoid privacy violations, destruction of data, and interruption or degradation of our services.

To learn more, see our .

Payments security

Credit cards

Open Collective doesn't store any credit card number, we're instead relying on our partner - a secure solution that is widely adopted by the industry. If our systems are compromised, we can't lose your credit card number because we simply don't have it.

about Stripe's security.

Login system

According to :

Passwordless authentication, by its nature, eliminates the problem of using an unsafe password. This means that one of the biggest user errors is taken out of your login. Not only is passwordless authentication safe to use, it might even be safer than a traditional username + password login.

about our login system.

From your transactions you can export a CSV file that can be used to further process transactions for your reporting and accounting needs.

To download a CSV of your transactions click on the 'export CSV' button in the top right hand corner.

If you have applied any filters on the transactions page these will be applied to the export set. At the bottom left corner of the export screen you will see a confirmation of the number of transactions included in that set.

You then have an option to decide which fields you would like to export. The “Platform Default” export is a selection of fields created to answer typical reporting and accounting needs. So it may be a good starting point. If it is, simply click “Export CSV” and your export file will begin to download.

New Preset

You can further customize the export set by selecting which fields will be exported and in what order. For this select “New Preset.”

Presets are shared within your organization so when defining a New Preset, ensure you give it a meaningful name so that your fellow admins will be able to recognize and utilize it.

Select your desired fields in the 'Available fields' section.

Reorder your selected fields in the 'Selected fields for export' section.

You are also able to clear the selection to start your preset from scratch

Save and Export your Preset

You have the option to save the preset, this will make it available to all admins of your Collective/Fiscal Host.

Export a Sample to test the data set before committing and downloading the full CSV via Export CSV.

Transaction Pairs

Transactions are always created in complementary pairs: a credit transaction and a debit transaction. For example, when Contributor A makes a contribution to Collective B, two transactions are created:

Or when an expense is paid from Collective B to Payee C, two transactions are also created:

Transaction Groups

Usually transactions are created in groups that have a shared context. For example, when a contribution is made by Contributor A via Stripe to Collective B that is hosted by Fiscal Host C the following transaction group will be created:

1. A pair of CONTRIBUTION transactions.

2. A pair of PAYMENT PROCESSOR FEE transactions.

3. A pair of HOST FEE transactions

Ledger Perspectives

Different users sees a different perspective of the same ledger. The perspective a user sees depends on the account through which they are looking at the ledger. Typically each account sees only transactions related to it. Fiscal hosts are an exception since they see both their own transactions and the transactions of the collectives they host.In the above contribution example, the contributor will see just one transaction - their contribution debited from their account:

A collective admin will see three transactions which correctly represent the contribution and two fees - resulting in a net $8.50 for the collective:

The Stripe account (though it has no users, there is a global Stripe account to which transactions are attributed) will show just the payment processor fee that it charged:

Fiscal hosts see the largest amount of transactions since they see both their own transactions and the transactions of their hosted collectives (for which they are fiscally responsible):

A fiscal host perspective includes two sets of transactions:

1. Transactions related to the fiscal host organization account (operational funds).

2. Transactions related to the accounts of the collectives hosted (past and present) by the fiscal host (managed funds).

Therefore, the fiscal host ledger includes a large and more complex set of transactions. Lets take the following example where three collectives hosted by the fiscal host each receive each one contribution. This results in three groups of transactions:

The “Operational Funds” perspective (funds that belong to the fiscal host as an organization) would show:

1. Income credited to the as a HOST FEE transaction from each of the three contributions.

2. Platform fees debited from the host to the platform (if there is a revenue share agreement with the platform) as a HOST FEE SHARE transaction.

The “Managed Funds” perspective (funds held by the fiscal host on behalf of collectives) would show an aggregated view of all the transactions from their hosted collectives. In this case it would show:

1. Income credited to each of the collectives as a CONTRIBUTION transaction.

2. Fees debited from each of the collectives for payment processor fees as a PAYMENT PROCESSOR FEE transaction.

3. Host fees debited from each of the collectives as a HOST FEE transaction.

What can I do with an Open Collective?

• Collect financial contributions

• Pay bills and reimburse expenses

• Provide automatic budget transparency

• Transact without incorporating your own legal entity

What is Open Collective good for?

Open Collective is great for all kinds of collaborative groups, like meetups, open-source projects, neighbourhood associations, clubs, unions, movements, conferences, non-profits, grant recipients, and incubators.

You shouldn't have to incorporate a legal entity, start a new bank account, and do bookkeeping just to collect and spend money for a project—and with Open Collective you don't have to.

Why should I use Open Collective?

Open Collective makes it easy to be transparent about your finances. We help you collect recurring or one-off contributions from sponsors, supporters, or members.

Spending from your Open Collective is simple: the person to be paid submits a receipt or invoice, you approve it, and they get paid. We believe that financial transparency creates stronger collaboration, so everyone can see how money flows in and out of your Collective.

What do Collectives spend money on?

There are as many answers to this question as there are Collectives! It's up to each community to decide how to spend their funds.

Some communities delegate financial decision-making to a specific person or role, some develop policies about what should be funded, and others have processes to make spending decisions together as a group.

For ideas and examples, check out this article: Has Your Open Source Community Raised Money? Here’s How to Spend It.

Some common expenses are hosting costs, documentation, community moderation, printing t-shirts and stickers, conference travel expenses, food at meetups, time spent working on specific features, or even paying someone to work on a project full time!

For more details about how to spend money, see our documentation about expenses.

How do I pay people?

Money contributed to a Collective goes to the bank account of the Fiscal Host. When someone wants to be paid, they submit an expense through your Collective page. After you approve it, the person is reimbursed via PayPal.

Expenses are visible publicly, so everyone can see how much money was spent and on what (though private details like emails, names, and addresses are only visible to that user and the admins).

How much does it cost?

See details about Fiscal Hosts and pricing.

How can I pause or stop accepting contributions?

Remove all tiers and turn off flexible contributions.

You've got a Collective—awesome! Now what?

Once you have a Collective, you can start submitting expenses, edit your page content, and create events for your community right away.

In order to receive money or pay out expenses, you need a Fiscal Host or you need to be set up as an independent collective.

Whether you have a Fiscal Host yet or not, here are some steps you can take to get your Collective started.

1. Make your Collective your own

Update your images and main color and add about info. Here's how.

2. Add Core Contributors

If you have collaborators on your project who can help you manage your page and approve expenses add them as Core Contributors. Here's how.

3. Add Financial Contributors to your GitHub and website

Check the many ways you can export your data on Data Export and our diversity of Buttons & Banners.

4. Start tracking expenses

Submit expenses through your Collective, so others can see where money will be spent (even if you don't have any yet). This builds trust with potential supporters.

5. Spread the word

You can connect your Twitter account to your collective and automatically thank your backers. Here's how.

6. Launch!

Write a blog post, tell people the vision, and explain why you are raising money. For more detailed ideas about helping your Collective launch well, check out Ten Steps to Successful Open Source Crowdfunding.

If you need help, join our community on Discord or contact us.

Welcome aboard!

You can change the fiscal host of your Collective to a different existing host, or start your own host and move it there.

What does it mean to change fiscal hosts?

Your fiscal host is the house where your Collective "lives" legally and financially. Moving house means your Collective's funds will go to the new host organization's bank account, and the new fiscal host assumes legal responsibility for your project. The new host admin will be the one pressing the "pay" button on your approved expenses.

What are the benefits of being able to change hosts?

No lock-in! If you start out being fiscally hosted by another organization and eventually want to set up your own legal entity, you can move your Collective. This is great for projects that are bootstrapping early on and later build more legal infrastructure.

You can also change between established fiscal host organizations. If you start out under a generalist host, you may later switch when a host-specific to your movement or focus area forms. This can happen when a movement scales up, for example. Or you might want to move hosts to change the currency your Collective is in from Dollars to Euros.

What happens to my recurring financial contributions, followers of updates, and transaction history?

Some recurring contributions can be automatically transferred. Some others, like PayPal subscriptions, cannot be transferred and will need to be manually re-established by your contributors.

The people that are subscribed to your updates will continue to receive them. Your history of transactions will remain intact. Your donors or sponsors are unlikely to notice any changes to your Collective (except the little "hosted by" text on your page).

What is the process for changing fiscal hosts?

Your fiscal host determines whose bank account your money sits in. To change hosts, you need to take all the funds out of the old bank account. You have two options to zero your collective balance. You can either send the funds directly to the new host or manually zero your collective balance.

Sending funds directly to the new host

Zeroing your collective balance

2. Navigate to your Collectives Dashboard > Settings > Fiscal Host

3. Remove your current Fiscal Host.

4. Select Create a fiscal host (if you want to set up your own), Apply to an existing host (if you'll be hosted by another entity), or visit the page of the Fiscal Host you wish to join and click on the Apply button.

5. Wait for your new Fiscal Host to approve your request.

What if I want to move to a different platform instead?

Open Collective is open source, so it's technically possible to fork the codebase and set it up on your own servers. This means you would no longer use opencollective.com and would be on your own website.

You can move Collectives from Fiscal Hosts on opencollective.com to a host set up on your own site. It's also possible to transfer over your recurring financial contributions (Stripe subscriptions).

However, Stripe support needs to make those transfers as it requires them to authenticate with your own Stripe account totally independent of Open Collective. They have performed this service in the past, but the timeframe and details are outside Open Collective's control.

Email Notifications

We will always let you know about important changes and updates, but you can customize the type of non-transactional notifications you receive through email from specific roles and entities in the platform.

To manage email notifications for your individual profile as well as the collectives and organizations you are part of, you can open the Notifications Settings page that you can find in your Account Settings:

Notifications regarding your activity

These are the notification settings related to the activities that occur on the platform. These activities may have been triggered directly by you or by someone else in the context of a Collective or Organization that you are a core contributor to.

There are potentially three main groups in this section that will be displayed or not based on the organizations you're part of.

• Collectives you host: These are the notifications you receive as the admin of a fiscal host. This includes all the notifications relevant to the fiscal-host admin that may have been triggered by the host or any of the collectives you're hosting.

• Collectives you manage: These are the notification you receive as the admin of a collective. This includes all the notifications relevant to this collective admin, these notifications may have been triggered by you, another collective admin, or a contributor in this specific collective context.

• Organizations you manage: Same as the previous section, but display only Organizations.

On the Collectives you host group, you'll find all the collectives you're a core contributor to next to the host's main notifications toggle switch. This switch will let you disable all the non-transactional notifications triggered by this host and its hosted collectives.

You can also click on Show advanced settings to expand and tweak the classes of notifications you want to receive. This setting is particularly useful for hosts that segment their responsibilities managing their notifications. Notice that whenever you switch the host main toggle, you're also resetting the class configuration you set.

For the Collectives and Organizations you manage groups, we display only a summary of your current settings and a button to open those group-specific settings:

You can then use the "Show group settings" button to open the same type of settings you have for the Host group settings:

Updates about the platform and Collectives you support

These are the notifications triggered by updates and newsletters sent by our platform and by the collectives you support.

Contributions

1. A contribution will typically include a pair of CONTRIBUTION transactions and a pair of PAYMENT_PROCESSOR_FEE transactions.

2. If the contribution is made to a collective that is hosted by a fiscal host and if that host charges a hosting fee then there will also be a pair of HOST_FEE transactions.

3. If there is a fiscal host and the fiscal host has a revenue share agreement with the platform then there will also be a pair of HOST_FEE_SHARE transactions.

4. If HOST_FEE_SHARE applies and the payment processor is able, when the contribution is processed, to split the funds and direct part to the fiscal host and another part to the platform then the HOST_FEE_SHARE amount is passed directly to the platform. If that is not possible then the entire contribution (minus the payment processor fee) amount is directed to the fiscal host and a pair of HOST_FEE_SHARE_DEBT transactions are also created to account for money owed by the fiscal host to the platform. The debt transactions are later aggregated and used to generate an expense through which the fiscal host pays the platform and the debt is reconciled.

As a result, a single contribution can result in a set of transactions:

Find out more about Platform settlement expenses.

Refunded Contributions

When contributions are refunded, a new transaction group is created. It contains a set of opposite (relative to the contribution itself) transactions:

1. The contribution is returned: debited from the collective and credited to the contributor

2. The host fees are returned: debited from the fiscal host and credited to the collective.

3. The host fee share paid to the platform is returned: is debited from the platform and credited to the fiscal host.

4. The host fee share debt cancelled: debited from the fiscal host and credited to the platform.

5. Payment processor fees transactions are NOT reversed since they are typically not refunded by the payment processors. In such cases fiscal hosts cover the not refunded payment processor fees and this is represented in the ledger with a pair of PAYMENT_PROCESSOR_COVER transactions.

As a result, the ledger footprint of a refunded contribution includes:

1. The contribution transactions are one transaction group.

2. The refund transactions are a second transaction group.

3. Relationships between the transactions in the two transaction groups. Each transaction in the contribution transaction group (except the payment processor fees) will have a Refund Transaction ID that points to the opposite transaction in the refund transaction group.

4. The contribution transactions will be marked as REFUNDED.

5. The related refund transactions will be marked as REFUND.

It is possible to imagine these two transaction sets existing side by side:

Perspectives of Refunded Contributions

From a contributor perspective a refunded contributions looks like a straightforward pair of opposite transactions - a debit when the contribution was made and a credit when it was refunded.

From a collective perspective a refunded contribution looks slightly less symmetric because the PAYMENT PROCESSOR FEE transaction is not refunded and is instead reflected by the PAYMENT PROCESS COVER transaction:

From a fiscal host “Operational Funds” perspective a refunded contribution looks symmetrical except for the PAYMENT PROCESSOR COVER transaction:

From a fiscal host “Managed Funds” perspective a refunded contribution looks the same as it does from a collective perspective:

Disputed Contributions

A dispute occurs when a contributor files a complaint with a payment processor (usually because of suspected fraud). If a dispute is settled in favor of the fiscal host the contribution transactions in the ledger remain unchanged. If a dispute is settled in favor of a contributor the transaction will be refunded (and refund transactions will be created in the ledger).

Regardless of the dispute outcome, payment processors charge a dispute fee (paid by the fiscal host) which is recorded in the platform as an additional pair of PAYMENT_PROCESSOR_DISPUTE_FEE transactions:

Added funds are funds that are manually added to collective accounts by fiscal hosts when they process manual bank transfers and checks. Added fund related transactions are potentially different from contribution related transactions:

1. They are initiated by a fiscal host admin and not by a contributor.

2. They are created in response to manual data entry (and not automated interaction with a payment processor system).

3. Can be manually dated by the fiscal host admin to reflect when the funds actually arrived. In such cases the “Transaction Date” will show the date (and time) the transaction itself was created in the ledger and and the “Effective date” will show the date entered by the fiscal host admin.

Added funds transaction groups typically look like contributions in the ledger where instead of a pair of CONTRIBUTION transactions there will be a pair of ADDED_FUNDS transactions.

Open Collective allows you to create a transparent funding page for your project in just a few clicks. No need to incorporate, hire a lawyer and accountant, or define organizational roles!

Once you've registered on Open Collective, reveal the dropdown menu by clicking on your username, then click on the + New button under the My Collectives section.

Then, select the category that best describes your Collective.

If you are not creating an open-source Collective, you will be immediately directed to a Collective creation form, where you will be asked for your Collective name, URL slug of choice, and a brief description of your Collective's activities.

If you are creating a Collective for an open-source project, you will be directed to a verification process to join the Open Source Collective fiscal host. More info about that here.

Two-factor authentication adds an extra layer of security for your account when logging in.

Enabling 2FA for Login

To enable two-factor authentication on your profile.

1. Click on your profile in the top right-hand corner.

2. Click on Profile Settings

3. Click on two-factor authentication from the menu on the left

3. You’ll need an app on your phone like Google Authenticator, Authy, or any other authenticator that can scan the QR code and give you a 6-digit 2FA code in return. You then type the code into the input field, and click "Verify and see recovery codes".

4. Recovery codes are used to access your account in case you can't access it with your authenticator app (for example, if you have lost your phone). Each code can only be used once. Save your 2FA recovery codes in a safe place, like a password manager app.

When you have 2FA enabled on your account, you will be prompted to enter a 6-digit code whenever you click the one-time login link we email to you.

For information about enabling two-factor authentication for payouts please refer here.

Expense Types

Expenses in the ledger are used to represent various kinds of financial activities. Therefore, in order to properly understand expense transactions you need to first look at the “Expense Type” field:

1. Invoices are expenses submitted by an expense submitter paid against submitted invoices.

2. Reimbursements are expenses submitted by an expense submitter that have already been paid by the expense submitter who is asking to be reimbursed against a receipt or another proof-of-payment.

3. Virtual Card Charges are expenses created on the platform when expenses have been paid using virtual credit cards.

4. Settlements are expenses generated by the platform based on and to account for debt transactions (PLATFORM_TIP_DEBT & HOST_FEE_SHARE_DEBT) that accumulate on the platform. These are typically paid from fiscal hosts to the platform.

5. Grants are also represented as expenses by which funds are typically transferred within a fiscal host from a fund account to recipients collectives.

Expense Transactions

An expense transaction group will typically include:

1. A pair of EXPENSE transactions.

2. A pair of PAYMENT PROCESSOR FEE transactions.

Unpaid Expenses

Fiscal hosts are able to mark expenses as unpaid when they encounter a payment error (it is the responsibility of the fiscal host admin to verify that the funds paid are accounted for). When an expense is marked as unpaid a new transaction group is created in which:

1. The expense is credited back to the paying collective and debited from the payee.

2. Payment processor fees transactions are NOT reversed since they are typically not refunded by the payment processors. In such cases fiscal hosts cover the not-refunded payment processor fees and this is represented in the ledger with a pair of PAYMENT_PROCESSOR_COVER transactions.

A complete transaction set for an expense marked as unpaid can therefor look like:

As a result, the ledger footprint of an expense marked as unpaid includes:

1. The expense payment transactions are one transaction group.

2. The expense "unpaid" transactions are a second transaction group.

3. Relationships between the transactions in the two transaction groups. Each transaction in the expense transaction group (except the payment processor fees) will have a Refund Transaction ID that points to the opposite transaction in the "unpaid" transaction group.

4. The expense transactions will be marked as REFUNDED.

5. The related "unpaid" transactions will be marked as REFUND.

It is possible to imagine these two transaction sets side by side:

Perspectives of Unpaid Expenses

From the perspective of the payee (the person or organization being paid) the expense was first credited and then debited from their account:

From the perspective of the paying collective an expense and payment processor fee were first debited from the collective and then, when the expense was marked as unpaid, the funds are credited back to the collective together with credit from the fiscal host to cover the payment processor fees:

From a fiscal host “Operational Funds” perspective an “Unpaid” expense leaves only a PAYMENT PROCESSOR COVER transaction debited from the fiscal host to the collective to cover the un-refunded payment processor fees:

From a fiscal host “Managed Funds” perspective, an “Unpaid” expense looks the same as it does from a collective perspective:

The Activity Log gives you the ability to track activities happening through your user profile, collective or fiscal host.

You can access your Activity log via your Account Settings, Collective Settings or Fiscal Host Settings.

Click on Activity log within your settings

You can then filter the activity by Period or Activity.

When viewing from a Fiscal Host account, you can also filter by Account. This allows you to view the activity of your fiscal host, all of your hosted collectives or a specific collective.

January 2024: Separate payment processor fees and taxes

From January 2024 payment processor fees and taxes were separated from the transaction record in the ledger.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve received feedback from fiscal hosts and accountants that has prompted us to make a change to the ledger to make more it more consistent and future proof. We’ve modified the ledger so that payment processor fees and taxes are recorded as separate transactions.

This is how payment processor fees and taxes were represented in the ledger until now, as fields/properties of a transaction:

For contributions or expenses made after January 2024, separate transactions will be recorded for payment processor fees and taxes. For example:

CSV Export Backwards Compatibility

The default export configuration hasn’t changed and still includes a column for payment processor fees. However, from 2024, payment processor fees are exported as separate transactions and the payment processor fee column will be set to zero. If you need to continue to export data (from the 1st of January 2024 and onward) with payment processor fees as a column (instead of separate transactions) enable the “Separate transactions compatibility” option. This will convert the newly separated payment processor fee transactions back into transaction columns.

Dashboard Transactions List

In the dashboard transactions tool the new transactions (for payment processor fees and taxes) will appear as separate transactions. In this screenshot the blue line on the right hand side of the table is a visual indicator for a group of related transactions. Here you can see that a (now separate) Payment processor fee transaction is related to the contribution transaction.

Goals

You can define goals to share an overview of your financial plan with your community and to track your progress.

To create your own Collective goals, go to your Collective profile, click on Settings and then on Collective Goals.

You can choose between three different visual options.

Auto: Will switch from Logarithm to Linear when 30% of the goal is achieved.

Logarithm: Will make the progress bar appear larger to incentivise new contributions. This is backed by social proof.

Linear: Exact visual representation.

How to Create a Goal

To create a goal, give it a title, select a type:

• Balance goals are based on your current balance.

• Yearly budget goals are based on your estimated annual budge

it as either a goal balance or yearly budget, specify the amount you need and add a description. Don't forget to save your changes when you're done!

Tiers

Tiers can be used to provide perks and rewards to supporters, set membership fees, build funding drives (when used with goals), or simply categorise your contributions. You can control tiers by accessing the Tiers section in your collectives Settings:

Enabling flexible contributions

You can define whether you can to allow flexible contributions or not by manipulating the Enable flexible contributions checkbox.

Creating custom tiers

You can also create custom tiers on the same page. Click on add another tier:

A preview of the tier you are creating will appear alongside your the configured settings:

Configuring Tiers

The following options are available when creating a new tier:

Type

Generic, membership, service, product, donation.

Name

e.g. Gold Sponsor, Member, Supporter. This is the only required field to add a new Tier with the default values; all others are optional.

Description

Important information for Financial Contributors such as what does this tier mean or which rewards are included.

Interval

The frequency in which such contribution will be charged. It can be a one time contribution, a monthly one, yearly or flexible.

Amount type

Fixed or flexible. Flexible amounts can be adjusted by users as they wish.

Suggested amounts

Suggestions for contributors to pick from.

Default amount

A preset starting amount.

Minimum amount

The minimum amount allowed for this contribution, if any.

Available quantity

For limited edition contributions (such as special edition items, one-time events, etc).

Button text

The action word on the Tier card users click (such as donate, join, contribute). You can also add emojis if you wish!

Goal

Target amount you're trying to raise in this Tier.

Force standalone page

You can create a standalone page for the tier to send as a direct link to potential contributors:

You can access it from your Collective page by clicking on Read more.

Edit and delete a tier

To edit a tier, click on the 'Edit Tier' Button.

To delete a tier, click the delete button in the bottom left-hand corner

Support Tiers

A great way of having more companies supporting your project is by offering them a support tier, where you offer access to support in exchange for financial contributions. Companies may or may not use it but it gives them the peace of mind to have someone who knows the codebase very available to help them within a reasonable time frame.

An example is Babel's Base Support Sponsor tier.

Here is a template for a basic support tier for your collective:

Become a Base Support Sponsor with a yearly donation of $24,000 ($2k/month paid in full upfront). Get your logo on our README on Github and on the front page of our website, as well as access to up to 2 hours of support per month. Support will be remote with the option of a share screen or via private chat.

With the above tier example, your responsibilities as a Collective are:

• Adding the sponsor's logo on your website

• Engaging with them to provide the support you've agreed to via the channels specified

The Sponsor's responsibilities are:

• Contacting you via the specified channels

• Limiting their support requirements to the time slots specified

• Scheduling the time slots at least a week in advance

FAQ

For Collectives

How do I define the price?

It depends on a lot of things but mainly on how critical is your open source project to the organization (which is arguably quite subjective). We recommend starting at $500/month with a yearly commitment ($6k upfront) for access to two hours of support a month. As you grow, you can start increasing the price.

Why a yearly commitment?

It's easier for companies to budget services for the year. It also ensures that they contribute to the maintenance of the project.

What happens if I delete a tier?

If you delete a tier you will be given the option of continuing the recurring contributions for that tier.

These donations will appear under your "custom contributions" Tier.

Members will need to stop recurring payments from their accounts. Here is more information on how to cancel a recurring contribution.

For companies

By subscribing to a support tier, you not only get private time for your team to discuss the open-source project that you depend upon, but you are also helping the collective to maintain it. It's a great way to balance your interests with the interests of the community.

Do I get an invoice?

Yes, you will receive an invoice emitted by the host of the collective (for example, Open Source Collective 501c6).

Can I do a Purchase Order (PO)?

Hosts can work with you to go through your Purchase Order process. Just reach out to us.

What if we never were provided with support?

Please reach out to us and we will work it out.

Edit Settings

To access all settings for your Collective, click the settings button shown in the image below.

Info

The info section of the Collective settings enables you to add and change basic information about your page.

Display name - Display names are public and used wherever this profile appears publicly, like contributions, comments on updates, public info on expenses, etc.

Legal Name (optional) - Legal names are private and used in receipts, tax forms, payment details on expenses and other non-profit contexts. Legal names are only visible to admins.

Short description - This description appears at the top of your collective page. Example 'Test Test Test Collective'

Handle - the unique identifier that directs to your collectives page on Open Collective 'www.opencollective.com/yourcollectiveslug'

Location -

Currency - Your preferred currency

Tags - Identifiers utilised by search to find your collective

Social Links - Link to your website, Git repository and social media

Available links include: Discord, Discource, Facebook, Ghost, Git Repository, Github, GitLab, Instagram, Linkedin, Mastodon, Mattermost, Meetup, Peertube, Pixelfed, Slack, Tiktok, Tumblr, Twitter, Website, Youtube

Profile Page

Show and hide different sections on your collective page.

As an admin, all sections will appear in your view, with invitations to add content.

However, any sections without content will not appear to other users (for example, Updates and About).

Change Logo

To update your logo image, hover over it and click on Edit logo, or simply drag an image file onto the logo area.

Set Main Color

Your main color determines the color of links and buttons, tier cards, and the hero header if no image is set.

Click on Edit main color in the header area to set the color.

Set Cover Image

To change your cover image, click on Edit cover. By clicking on the image, you are able to move it around. You can also zoom in and out as you like. The optimal image size for a cover image is 2736x650.

You can specify an expense policy, which appears on the right of the submit expense form, to give guidance to expense submitters. Making it clear what expenses will be approved and what submitters need to do will save time for you and them.

To update your expense policy, go to your Collective's page, click on the settings button and go to the Policies page.

Examples

Webpack

We distribute the money according to the contributions on Github. There is a minimum threshold. You'll receive a mail when you made enough contributions last month.

Babel

Feel free to expense a public transport for a conference/meetup as a community member, or for things like stickers. For core members, transport/stay for things like TC39 meetings. For other expenses you can ask. Otherwise, we plan on spending most of the money trying to pay people full time.

Limit Who Can Submit and Approve Expenses

At the bottom of the Policies Settings screen, you'll see a set of options that allow you to limit who can submit and approve expenses to your collective:

• Ticking "Admins cannot approve their own expenses" will block admins from approving expenses submitted by themselves, effectively requiring another admin to approve their expenses.

• Ticking "Only allow expenses to be created by Team Members and Financial Contributors (they may invite expenses from other payees)." will limit who can see the "Submit Expense" button.

Fiscal Host Expense Policy

Your Fiscal Host can also set an expense policy. It will appear on the submit expense page, underneath the Collective policy.

Often times, Collective expense policies are focused on what categories of things are allowed as expenses, while the Fiscal Host policy pertains to required documentation, like details on invoices.

There are multiple ways to export your collectives data. Download your contributor data, Transactions information and delve into your export settings.

Contributor Information

Navigate to your collective's Dashboard -> Contributors.

Click on the Export CSV button in top right hand corner.

The CSV export contains:

• Contributor Profile URL

• Contributor Name

• Contributor Type (Individual or Company)

• Total Amount Contributed

• Currency

• Active Recurring Contribution

• Recurring Contribution Tier

• Recurring Contribution Amount

• Recurring Contribution Frequency

• First Contribution Date

• Latest Contribution Date

• Email

• Website

Exporting Transactions

Head to the budget section on your collective page. Click the Transactions tab

2. Click View all Transactions

3. Apply any filters to the CSV export.

For example select expenses in the Kind type to export a CSV with your expense information.

4. Download CSV on the right

Export Settings

Navigate to your collective's dashboard -> Settings -> Export.

On this page, you can export your data into:

• Contributor data CSV Export

• JSON Export

• Widgets

• Badges

• Contributors images

Export Contributors CSV

Download a file of all of your contributors, with these fields:

• Member ID

• Date Created

• User Type (User or Organisation)

• Role (Admin, Host, Backer, Follower)

• Tier

• Active Recurring Contribution

• Total Amount Donated

• Currency

• Lastest Transaction Date

• Lastest Transaction Amount

• User Profile URL

• Name

• Company

• Description

• Image

• Email

• Newsletter Opt in

• Twitter

• Github

• Website

Export JSON

Export your data to integrate with other applications.

Options:

• All members (contributors of all types)

• Only users (individuals)

• Only organizations

Parameters:

• limit: number of members to return

• offset: number of members to skip (for paging)

• TierId: only return the members that belong to this TierId. You can find the TierId as part of the URL after selecting a tier on your collective pag

Widget

Export an HTML script to use on your website, showing your financial contributors.

Export images

Badge

Create an SVG showing the number of financial contributors of your Collective. By updating the text in the URL, you can change the label and color.

Code:

https://opencollective.com/collective/tiers/backers/badge.svg?label=Backers&color=brightgreen

Result:

Contributor image

Create an SVG showing the icons of your financial contributors.

There are a range of options:

Code:

<object type="image/svg+xml" data="https://opencollective.com/collective/tiers/backers.svg?avatarHeight=36&width=600"></object>

Result:

If you want to close down your Collective, you can either archive or delete it. Either way, you first need to .

Navigate to your Collective's Dashboard > Settings > Advanced.

Delete a Collective

If your Collective does not have any transactions or financial activity, you can delete it. Deleting a Collective will remove its data, including memberships, payment methods, etc.

Archive a Collective

If your Collective has transactions, you can archive it instead of deleting. This will mark the Collective as inactive and prevent any new donations. If you want to re-activate your collective at a later stage, please follow the same steps shown below and find an updated button to unarchive the collective). Note that archiving a Collective will also cancel any recurring contributions and expenses.

We've moved our documentation for .

Options for Fiscal Hosting

In order to raise and spend money, you'll need a bank account associated with your Collective.

You can:

1. Join a , who will take care of things like accounting, banking, liability, and payments (most Collectives choose this option), or

2. Plug in your own bank account as an , or

3. Create to hold funds for multiple Collectives under the umbrella of your own legal entity.

How to add a Fiscal Host

There are different hosts that serve different missions, interest areas, and geographic. .

Click on the apply button on any host page, and if your project fits their criteria, they will approve it. (The apply button can sometimes be nestled under the actions button).

To see your Fiscal Host options, go to your Collective Page, click on the settings button and head to the Fiscal Host page.

• No one: No bank account or Host connected, not able to receive and spend money.

• Independent Collective: Use your personal or company bank account to hold funds for a single Collective.

• Our Own Fiscal Host: Run your own Fiscal Host that holds money for multiple Collectives.

• Apply to a Fiscal Host: Join a Host that provides this service to Collectives like you.

Applying to a fiscal host

Fiscal hosts have their own application criteria, which is often based on their location, their mission or impact area and their legal status.

Applying to a host will require that you answer some questions about your project that help the host asses whether you are appropriate for their organization.

Host Policies

Hosts also have policies which they will make you aware of during your application, some of these policies are enforced through the Open Collective platform including:

Minimum number of Administrators

Some hosts require that you have a minimum of two of more administrators associated with your Collective. If this is the case you will be asked to invite other administrators as part of your application process:

Roles

Admins have full permissions to change settings, approve expenses, and make financial contributions from the budget balance.

Core contributors show up in the Team section of your page and can create events, but can't change settings or approve expenses.

Accountants can access financial information, such as receipts, invoices, and reports. They can't change settings or approve expenses.

Adding, Editing and Removing team members

1. Go to your Collective page and click the gear next to your Collective logo.

2. Head to the Team tab. Here you can add, remove, or change people and roles.

3. Click the Invite Team Member button

4. This will then bring up a form in which you can search or invite a new user. Once you are done, click on Save at the bottom of the page.

5. Users will receive an invite to join the Collective. They will not be displayed publicly until this invitation is accepted. You will then see the new user that you have invited as pending until the invitation is accepted.

6. To edit a Team Member click the edit (pencil) button. This will allow you to edit the user's permissions and remove a user if you wish.

Re-send email invitations

If someone indicates that they didn't receive an invitation email, the first thing to do is for them to search for the keywords "Invitation to join" in the target inbox, including in the spam folder. If they still can't find them, the easiest way to re-trigger the emails is:

1. Go to the settings page of the Collective > Core contributors section

2. Remove the concerned users

3. Click on Save

4. ​Click on "Add core contributor" and add them again (you should be able to search by pasting user emails in the search box)

Before or , the balance must be at zero.

You can move money out of your Collective in several ways:

• to withdraw funds.

• in the same fiscal host.

• Giving the remaining balance to your Fiscal Host. You can access that option by navigating to your Collective's Dasboard > Settings > Advanced.

Leftover Balance

Let the Payee cover the fees

When emptying the balance for a collective, you have the option of charging the payment processor fees on the payee which will guarantee that 100% of the collective's balance will go out. This option is only available for bank transfers for hosts that support Transferwise at the moment.

When these conditions are met, the host admins will see a checkbox on the Pay expense modal:

Dealing with small leftovers

When it's not possible to use the feature previously described, you may sometimes end up with a small amount left behind if you try to withdraw 100% of your balance. This is usually caused by fees being hard to predict exactly.

If this happens, go to your Collective's page, click on the gear icon next to your logo, head to Advanced and use the Empty Balance button to transfer the remaining funds to your Fiscal Host.

Webhooks (generic, Slack, Discord)

Go to your settings, click on "Webhooks" then select the type and enter the URL for your webhook. The system will automatically detect Slack or webhook URLs and will adapt the payloads for them.

See to learn how to create a Slack webhook, or to learn how to create a Discord webhook.

While creating the webhook, you'll be able (in some cases) to preview the payload by clicking on the Info icon next to the activity name:

Other chat integrations (Mattermost, Gitter)

Twitter Integration

Connect your Twitter to automatically thank new supporters who contribute to your Collective! To do so, go to your Collective page, click on the gear icon, and head to the Connected Accounts page.

Organizations and collectives can opt-in to enforce 2FA for all their admins. Any attempt at triggering admin operations or visiting the admin pages will be blocked until the admins enable 2FA on their profiles. Projects and events inherit the 2FA settings from their parents.

How to enforce 2FA for all admins

1. Click on the user menu

2. Click on the settings icon next to the profile you want to enable "Enforce 2FA" for

3. Click on "Security"

4. Check "All admins must have two-factor authentication"

5. Click on Save

When visiting admin pages without 2FA, admins will be prompted to enable it