FAQ
Last updated
Last updated
Collect financial contributions
Pay bills and reimburse expenses
Provide automatic budget transparency
Transact without incorporating your own legal entity
You shouldn't have to incorporate a legal entity, start a new bank accounts, and do bookkeeping just to collect and spend money for a project—and with Open Collective you don't have to.
Open Collective is great for all kinds of collaborative groups, like meetups, open source projects, neighborhood associations, clubs, unions, movements, conferences, non-profits, grant recipients, and incubators.
Open Collective makes it easy to be transparent about your finances. We help you collect recurring or one-off contributions from sponsors, backers, or members. is simple: the person to be paid submits a receipt or invoice, you approve it, and they get paid. We believe that financial transparency creates stronger collaboration, so everyone can see how money flows in and out of your Collective.
There are as many answers to this question as there are Collectives! It's up to each community to decide how to spend their funds. Some communities delegate financial decision-making to a specific person or role, some develop policies about what should be funded, and others have processes to make spending decisions together as a group.
For ideas and examples, check out this article: .
Some common expenses are hosting costs, documentation, community moderation, printing t-shirts and stickers, conference travel expenses, food at meetups, time spend working on specific features, or even paying someone to work on a project full time!
Some things that make Open Collective special:
Built for ongoing collaborative communities, not one-off campaigns or individual creators.
Open source and designed for financial and technical transparency.
Expenses are visible publicly, so everyone can see how much money was spent and on what (though private details like emails, names, and addresses are only visible to that user and the Collective admins).
Like most other crowdfunding platforms, Open Collective takes a 5% commission (plus payment processing fees, approximately 3%).
For more details about how to spend money, see our documentation about .
Offers fiscal sponsorship as a service, using .
For more details, see the page.
Money contributed to a Collective goes to the bank account of the . When someone wants to be paid, they through your Collective page. After you approve it, the person is reimbursed via PayPal.
Another additional fee may apply depending on the (often 5%). A fiscal host is the organisation that maintains the bank account behind the scenes and takes care of bookkeeping, taxes, etc. If you operate an organization that can provide these services, you can , incurring no fiscal hosting fee.
See more details about and .