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Raku / problem-solving

🦋 Problem Solving, a repo for handling problems that require review, deliberation and possibly debate
Artistic License 2.0
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Creditcard for cloud services #117

Open rba opened 4 years ago

rba commented 4 years ago

For all the current cloud service a credit card is needed. This is the case for AWS, Digitalocean, Hetzner Cloud and I‘m sure for many more. And it‘s needed to apply for a sponsoring too. Digitalocean and AWS will just put a certain amount on your account and after this is used the credit card gets debited.

So far I‘ve used one from my personal credit cards. At the moment this is fine.

Neverthless, I like to discuss how we like to solve this in the future.

AlexDaniel commented 4 years ago

Ping @jnthn, @lizmat, @coke, @moritz

coke commented 4 years ago

Which services, what are the running costs?

rba commented 4 years ago

@coke Difficult to say. I try to keep the spendings as small as possible at the moment. The only place services got charged at the moment are in the range of 5-10 EUR/month on https://www.hetzner.com/cloud .

I'm currently using the business offering from https://www.revolut.com/ assigned to my own business (with taxes/VAT, accounting and so on). Revolut offers to create virtual credit cards (prepaid), where I can dynamically change the monthly limits. Like this I try to keep things under control. So far Revolut doesn't offer non-profit orgs to join (yet) (https://www.revolut.com/business/help/getting-started/is-my-business-eligible/what-types-of-business-entities-are-supported). This is all prepaid, so I had to park a certain amount of money there.

We don't know which cloud service we like to use in the future or if we just like to run docker containers on sponsored hosts. My main focus is still the web hosted services like the websites. Next steps should be to make them available redundant. In case we like to use the cloud (undecided which one) I expect we will spend ~ 50-100 EUR/month, up to 200 EUR/month. (No, I haven't asked around more widely, eg. not yet in the Slack channels from Perl Foundation. I wanted to ask for exactly what we need. Getting together the needs, takes time and needs discussions.)

Both Digitalocean and AWS had the prerequisite to have a valid payment source assigned even though the would offer some Open Source sponsoring. From DO I haven't heard back so they are seem interested in Perl 6 sponsoring and the AWS sponsoring form I've filled out recently only (#116). So no feedback yet. DO asked if we have a https://opencollective.com/ account. I got the impression the cloud companies like to make sure they don't have unpaid bills at the end of the month.

In Switzerland it's relatively easy to create a non-profit organisation ("Verein" in German, this is like an association). If the turn-around is getting > CHF 100k you're liable to VAT (7.7 %) and if your turn-around is < CHF 100k and the profit < 10k there are not taxes to pay in the place I live for a non-profit org. Getting a bank account is easy, yet hurdles might be to get a credit card, even a prepaid one. You have to have a proper accounting and a yearly meeting and a small board (2 persons). (I created and run a non-profit org with Matthias to run the Swiss Perl Workshops. Now passed over to the current organisers.) Taxes reduction is Switzerland is not accepted if you donate to an association, though. For this you need to have a charitable foundation (Stiftung). Non of the tech/software foundations in Switzerland got accepted as charitable so far (local taxes authorities have a list).

Bye-the-way I don't really enjoy to do money handling. Yet in infrastructure area, services cost money (if the are not getting donated) and then this has to be arranged somehow. For me it's important the handling is simple and transparent.

Does someone know what are the options/procedures under the umbrella of the Yet Another Society?

moritz commented 4 years ago

I don't have any running costs (except the yearly p6c.org renewal, which is negligible and is dealt together with all other domains I hold).

dwright commented 4 years ago

Does someone know what are the options/procedures under the umbrella of the Yet Another Society?

Hi,

If you would like to have costs for a Perl site covered by TPF, the first step would be to make an official request. Please provide as much detail as possible, including:

We're not going to be able to give you our credit card number. The options would be either:

rba commented 4 years ago

@dwright Dan, thank you for the feedback.

This confirms my efforts to first find the service we like to proceed for the future. This would then hopefully allow us to budget the costs for an upcoming month/year. And then I will be able to file an official request.

Whenever I start exploring a new service I open a separate main account with the credit card information, then I register a personal account for the technical stuff. So handing over the main account to the TPF should be hassle-free.

lizmat commented 3 years ago

FWIW, I've just renewed the raku.org domain for another year.