hi folks! we’re doing things in a flipped order this month; news first, then numbers.
Suspension of Eggbux development due to Stripe prohibiting tipping and restricting “content creation” subscriptions
as you may have seen, Stripe recently updated their Prohibited and Restricted Businesses list to ban tipping and restrict most types of “content creator” subscriptions. to quote from the prohibited section:
Content creation
- Transactions that provide compensation to creators without an underlying piece of digital content associated. Examples include subscriptions to free, public content or a tip button on a profile page
and the restricted section (requires permission from stripe, which they are not obligated to provide):
Content creation
Content creation related transactions
- Content-related tips and gifts
- Purchases of access to exclusive content or digital goods
EDIT: After we published this, we learned that Stripe had once again silently changed their policy and wording. The quoted sections reflect policy as of when we made these decisions.
this bans tipping in the context we have been developing, which is also the context used by platforms like Ko-Fi.
we’re also unsure if the restrictions on subscriptions for exclusive content would apply just to us, or to every single user accepting subscriptions on the platform. the former would create an existential risk where Stripe could wholesale revoke our ability to accept money on behalf of users, which would put everyone at risk; the latter creates undue burden for users accepting subscriptions.
regardless of if we could work around these restrictions, the fact that they were suddenly added with immediate effect tells us that we would not be safe launching with Stripe support. the risk to ourselves and to users that depend on eggbux for all or some of their income would be too high.
this is unfortunate, as we have been building around Stripe and Stripe Connect. these products give us a lot of functionality for free, which we would need to build out ourselves with a different payment processor.
after some careful assessment of our options we’ve determined that any path forward would require essentially starting over from scratch and would add additional technical scope on top of what we already had.
with these changes, we don’t feel that we have the resources to ship eggbux in a reasonable timeframe. in the time we’ve been 100% focused on eggbux, cohost has languished and suffered; the only user-facing work over the last month has been bugfixes, and our active user numbers have reflected this stagnation. the unfortunate truth is that without constant momentum, we have trouble retaining users.
we’ve made the difficult decision to suspend development on eggbux. the risk is no longer worth it with our current resources. when we have the resources in the future, we may start work on it again; we still want to try and break Patreon’s effective monopoly, but it’s not feasible right now.
we are shifting our entire focus back to cohost. we have a long list of improvements and features we want to ship, large and small, towards our overall goal of reaching financial sustainability.
we’ll have more to share about our overall roadmap soon, but for now we’ve picked back up our rewrite of the post editor (with drag and drop and inline attachment support!) and are hoping to have it out within the next few weeks. we’re excited about the future of cohost and looking forward to y’all seeing what we’re working on.
now that that’s over with, it’s numbers time.
The actual financial update
| Category | As of May 31 | As of April 30 | % Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expenses | $39,581 | $46,526 | |
| Income | $14,937 | $16,250 | |
| Net income | -$24,650 | -$31,096 | |
| Active subscribers | 3,287 | 3,332 | -1.4% |
| MRR | $20,986 | $21,352 | -1.7% |
| Subscriber churn rate | 2.03% | 3.11% | -34.7% |
| Revenue per subscriber | $6.38 | $6.41 | -0.5% |
| MAU | 19,127 | 22,738 | -15.8% |
| MAU → Subscriber conversion rate | 17.2% | 14.7% | +17% |
| Artist Alley listing weeks sold | 160 | 376 |
Some notes here:
- due to an issue with our template, expenses and income were missing from last month’s financial update. this has been resolved and these will be present moving forward.
- expenses for April, May, and June are all strange due to some additional costs around funding (legal, accounting, etc). Expenses are expected to stabilize in July.
- we’re also expecting a slight drop in expenses due to a staffing change. I (jae) have taken a voluntary 40% pay cut and shifted to a three-day-per-week work schedule due to health issues. I appreciate privacy in this matter; I’m only saying anything publicly because it has a material impact on our expenses (roughly $3k less on payroll per month).
- we shed an honestly concerning number of active users in May, likely caused by our lack of visible work on cohost. this contributed to our risk analysis with suspending eggbux development.
- because we’ve shed so many users, our MAU → Subscriber conversion rate is becoming an absolutely useless metric. We’re going to continue sharing it, but we aren’t treating it as something meaningful.
- Artist Alley, despite being down from its introduction (which was expected), accounted for a bit over 10% of our income. We have plans on how to further improve Artist Alley moving forward.
- June and July are expected to have higher income as those are major annual renewal periods for cohost plus.
that’s all for this month. expect to hear more about our roadmap soon, as well as a return to more frequent patch notes.
thank you, as always, for using cohost 
~jae
🔪🤑
I'm also glad to see artist alley listings are hanging on tho
