Fiscal Hosting FAQs
Fiscal hosting enables Collectives to transact financially without needing to legally incorporate. In other contexts, this is sometimes called fiscal sponsorship.
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 backers and sponsors. You can think of a fiscal host as an umbrella organization for the Collectives in it.
The fiscal host is responsible for taxes, accounting, compliance, financial admin, and paying expenses approved by the Collective’s core contributors (admins).
The Open Collective platform makes the job of fiscal hosts a lot easier by providing our software platform for tracking budgets and expenses, generating reports, and automating bookkeeping. Fiscal hosts have a dashboard where they can see their Collectives and perform common actions.
By sharing a host, Collectives are effectively mutualizing the cost and overhead of having a legal entity.
Fiscal Hosts can be in any location and take any form of legal entity (as long as they have a bank account, PayPal account, and Stripe account). Each one determines its own policies for which Collectives it will host and what fees it will charge.
Below are the hosts that Open Collective manages, plus some more examples.
Fiscal Host | Hosted Collectives | Fee |
Open Source Collective | Open source projects | 5% |
Open Collective Foundation | US-based charity projects | 5%-8% |
Open Collective Inc | Our own transparent budget | 0% |
Open Collective Europe | EU-based Collectives | 5% |
Women Who Code | Local chapters | 0% |
Operation Code | Local chapters | 30% |
Last modified 5mo ago