Have the costs of FR ever been posted? It is a simple forum web site. How much does it cost to run?
When you walk into someone’s house do you question them on how much they paid for it, what it costs to run and maintain and their utility bills?
If you are truly interested, go to the donation link ( https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/ ) and click on “Budget.” The breakdown of our expected costs has been posted there and updated periodically since we started the current donation system about 10 years ago.
But if you’re just here to bellyache and anti-freep, click here instead: http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/logoff
Well there is a “budget”. I think the GSA has one of those too. : ),
But then let there be no mistake, Free Republic is a privately held Limited Liability Corporation for profit entity so is under no obligation to disclose its actual financials to anyone save for the IRS and the State of California. Then again, it operates much like a not for profit in that all income is generated from “donations”. So it would be nice to see an actual working budget and an actual budget vs. actual expenses posted. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for when asking for donations. I think a lot of us (especially the bean counters like me) would be a lot more comfortable donating if we had a better idea of how the donations were actually spent. Not that I think that Jim and others who run the site aren’t entitled to an income, nor would it matter if that figure was known, but the budget is so lacking in any sort of detail as to make it meaningless.
For instance, there is a line item in the budget for “Travel Expenses” at $1,200 per month. Really? $14,400.00 per year on travel? Why does an HTML website require $14,400.00 per year in travel expenses? That’s twice the amount budgeted for Equip, Maintenance and Repairs.
As far as the need for new servers and “equipment”, it would be nice to see a real estimate and detailed budget for what is actually needed. As someone else pointed out, commercial grade servers are pretty cheap now days. Heck my nephew in law recently bought a very nice used but relative new and working commercial grade server for a couple of hundred bucks off of eBay.