To celebrate $10k MRR, we're donating 5% of our revenue

Working on and growing a bootstrapped, self-funded and open source startup is not easy. The web is a noisy and competitive place. Raising awareness and building trust is challenging. Most projects fail in their quest to reach sustainability.

At Plausible Analytics, we’re very fortunate to have reached sustainability with our recent $10,000 monthly recurring revenue milestone. We’re a team of two, we’re based in the EU and at these levels, we can pay our rent and other bills from the salaries we get for the work we do on open source software.

It’s a dream come true and a fantastic feeling that allows us to start thinking about giving back. So we’re now announcing our pledge and commitment to give back 5% of our gross revenue to the environmental causes and open source software. That's $842 in January alone!

Becoming sustainable is tough and sacrifices need to be made

Getting a startup to sustainability is tough and sacrifices need to be made. Looking at my personal finances, since I joined Plausible as a co-founder in March last year, I’m down more than $27,000 in personal savings. My co-founder Uku has lost a similar level of savings since he started working on Plausible.

Just because you take a risk and start working on a startup doesn’t stop the bills from coming in. We had some months without salaries and we’re still not at the levels of what we used to have in the corporate world but we’ve made huge progress.

My personal goal for this year would be to pay all my bills and other personal expenses from my Plausible salary, recover the savings lost in the first year and hopefully start saving money again. This is something that is now a realistic goal.

And our stories are not uncommon in the world of indie hacking. To work on something new, to try and make a difference in your own way to the things you care about, many people and teams sacrifice a lot of their time and resources. And only some can tell the story of making it work too.

This is why we have sustainability as the purpose of our donation fund. We’d like to contribute to our planet’s sustainability and the sustainability of other open source projects that we rely on.

We dedicate 5% of our gross revenue to environmental causes and open source projects

By us being in control of the decisions and the direction we want to take Plausible in, we don’t need to cut corners or force things to achieve our personal goals. And we can still do our tiny bit to help and give back to the initiatives that we care about.

When you don't need to "maximize shareholder value", you can make "financially irresponsible" decisions like these just because it feels like the right thing to do.

We’ve started this commitment on January 1st, 2021 and we pledge to donate 100% of this fund at the start of 2022. No questions asked. We will take some time at some point this year to decide the environmental causes and open source projects we will donate to.

Every Plausible subscriber contributes to our fund. And the price you pay for your subscription doesn’t change. Thank you for supporting us and for helping us make a bit of a difference!

You can learn more here 👉 https://plausible.io/giving-back