Welcome to Thursday That Feels Like a Tuesday Thursday! We had our end of month meeting yesterday, our financials are up to date, let's talk money.
At this point, I don't think there's any terms left to define (check August and July's updates for all those) so this month we can just have some NUMBERS.
Users
As of right now, we have 20,793 users (up from 19,056 last month), every single one of which is activated and able to post. While previously we've been seeing 40-50 new sign ups a day, these last few days we've averaged around 180 per day! We assume this spike has to do with Certain Competitors making Weird Decisions that People Don't Like but it's impossible for us to know for sure. Oh well!
Our Monthly Active Project count is unfortunately down from last month, from 4,314 to 3,837. We think most of this decline is due to the fact that, as of last report, there was still an incoming flood of brand-new users who didn’t come back after their first visit, and they’ve been becoming inactive again over the past couple of weeks — but in the longer term, this is one of those metrics we kind of need to get bigger, so we're thinking about stuff we can do there. We'd ask "what missing feature is keeping cohost from becoming one of your three websites" but our numbers would be skewed by the only people seeing and answering that question being active already.
Conversion Rate and Subscriptions
Subscription growth is also down, but we also haven't done anything to promote cohost Plus! in the last month so we're not feeling especially bad about that. As of September 27, we're at 497 subscribers, up from 483 the month before. That's not great! MRR is now at $2,305.92, up from $2,255.20. Also not great! We clearly need to be doing more to make cohost Plus! more appealing, as well as maybe promote it a bit more. It remains difficult to find a work priority balance between "things that make us money" and "things the site needs that may not make us money."
Active user conversion is at 13.8%, up from 11.39%, but this growth is directly attributable to the decrease in Monthly Active Projects, and thus not actually a win.
Overall profit/loss
Unfortunately, this section needs to start with some major errata.
While preparing the financial update, I discovered that, due to bad timing with when we were preparing over the last few months, our end of month payroll was not being included in our expenses, making it look like we had more money than we did. I’ve made the adjustments for this month, but August is also incorrect. We’ll be adjusting our timing for when we prepare our financials internally to prevent this from happening. This is, unfortunately, entirely my fuck up. At this point, all I can do is fix it going forward.
First, corrections for August. We initially stated we ended August with $158,711 in the bank. We actually ended with $136,224. This means that our estimated EOY cash on hand, which we initially estimated at $39k, should have been closer to $16k. $23k is a lot to be off by! Instead of having about an extra month and a half of runway, we have closer to two weeks. Fortunately, new funding is coming (more on that below) so this doesn’t mean we’re in shutdown mode. (Also: this would be a really good time to consider signing up for cohost Plus! if you haven’t already. Check your settings page for details.)
As of today, we have $108,189 in the bank. We lost $69,712 in Q3, which puts us just barely ahead of the $70k estimate we had last month. Our proportion of expenses to revenue hasn't meaningfully changed since last month, nor has what all the money is going to, so I'm not going to break it down again.
Since the end of Q3 met our predictions from August, our EOY cash on hand estimate remains around $16k (ignoring any additional funding).
On the funding front, we're currently in the process of actually getting that funding (meetings are scheduled). There's a few necessary components here, but by far the hardest is "figuring out how much money we actually want/need." There's a lot of still open questions about how many people we’ll need next year, especially for shipping tipping and creator subscriptions (two relatively complicated and high risk features that get us much closer to paying our own bills). We're still working these out, but we anticipate everything being done in time.
Looking forward
As mentioned above, we're still planning on shipping individual user tips and individual subscription management in the future. We're thinking through how we want to do this (with assistance from our funder) and so, like always, don't have timelines. We'll share more once we have things to share. Gift subscriptions for cohost Plus! also remain in the pipeline, although somewhat deprioritized behind larger quality-of-life changes.
We've got work in progress to improve the experience of popular tags, including hiding posts with certain CW's from these tags. We really appreciate that everyone posting Borderline content so far has been extremely consistent with their use of CWs, as it makes things like this much easier for us. In the interest of transparency, we'll be sharing a full technical ruleset once things are done.
As you've likely seen in the patch notes, progress on shipping new features has been slowed by my being out or unavailable for the past month, and generally having trouble with long covid recovery over the last few months. I'm hopeful this situation will improve because I, personally, don't like it. To be clear: I am the only person pressuring myself to try and work when I'm having this much trouble, so don't get mad at anyone else.
We are still working on moving away from Cloudflare. This is proving to be a very complicated process (which isn't necessarily surprising, but still) and we don't have anything to share regarding timelines. We will have a scheduled downtime when the switchover occurs, which we will post about here and on status.cohost.org.
Thanks for reading! As much as these can be a pain to write, I do enjoy having these numbers out in the open, and I hope y’all do as well. We’ve got some Someday work to make things more accessible than just a post we put out every month, but there’s a lot of higher priority things to do first. So for now, you’re stuck with this.
Thanks, as always, for using cohost!

~jae
unfortunate news in this one, slow growth + accounting errors means EOY is lookin a little less hot. at least we figured it out now i guess????? ah well
