FAQ

FAQ

What is a fiscal host?

Fiscal hosting enables Collectives to transact financially without needing to legally incorporate. In other contexts, this is sometimes called fiscal sponsorship.

A fiscal host is a legal company or individual who holds a Collective’s funds in their bank account, and can generate invoices and receipts for backers and sponsors. You can think of a fiscal host as an umbrella organization for the Collectives in it.

The fiscal host is responsible for taxes, accounting, compliance, financial admin, and paying expenses approved by the Collective’s core contributors (admins).

The Open Collective platform makes the job of fiscal hosts a lot easier by providing our software platform for tracking budgets and expenses, generating reports, and automating bookkeeping. Fiscal hosts have a dashboard where they can see their Collectives and perform common actions.

By sharing a host, Collectives are effectively mutualizing the cost and overhead of having a legal entity.

What are some examples of fiscal hosts?

Fiscal Hosts can be in any location and take any form of legal entity (as long as they have a bank account, Paypal account, and Stripe account). Each one determines its own policies for which Collectives it will host and what fees it will charge.

Below are the hosts that Open Collective manages, plus some more examples.

Fiscal Host	Hosted Collectives	Fee
Open Source Collective	Open source projects	5%
Open Collective Foundation	US-based charity projects	5%
Open Collective Inc	Our own transparent budget	0%
Open Collective Europe ASBL	EU-based Collectives	5%
Open Collective Paris	Paris-based collectives	0%
Brussels Together	Brussels citizen initiatives	€10/mo
Women Who Code	Local chapters	0%
Operation Code	Local chapters	30%

Why are there different fiscal hosts?

We want to enable all kinds of diverse Collectives, so we make our platform available to a network of fiscal hosts with different missions in different geographies. Each fiscal host determines its own policies and fees.

Some projects can’t be fiscally hosted by the entities Open Collective runs itself, because they are in a country we don’t cover or don’t fit under our entities' missions. For example, Open Source Collective is only for Open Source software projects, and Open Source Foundation is for US-only charity projects.

Do all Collectives need a fiscal host?

Every Collective that receives or pays out money needs a fiscal host, because they need to connect the host's bank account, Stripe account, and Paypal account to activate Open Collective’s payment features. If you already have a legal company set up, or you are comfortable taking on the responsibility as an individual, you can fiscally host your own Collective.

How do I find a Fiscal Host?

Go to the fiscal host's page and click “Apply to create a Collective”. You can see all hosts here.

I'm interested in becoming a Fiscal Host

Please see our documentation on becoming a host.