I’m pleased to announce that, as part of our broader plans to migrate SourceHut to Europe, and after many months of hard work, SourceHut has begun to accept subscription payments in Euro today – one of our oldest and most highly demanded feature requests. The pricing is similar to the US dollar pricing at €2, €5, and €10 per month (slightly more expensive than USD due to the Euro’s purchasing power),1 with two months free if you pay annually. We have added support for SEPA direct debits, iDEAL, and Bancontact.
As before, payment remains optional for most SourceHut features (and many features still do not even require an account). Financial support is available for those who cannot afford the lowest subscription tier. SourceHut remains committed to never pricing anyone out: hundreds of people have applied for and received financial aid for any number of reasons. Please apply for support if your situation requires it.
On the other hand, all users who have the means to support SourceHut are kindly asked to do so, provided that the public alpha has reached a level of maturity equal to their needs. SourceHut depends entirely on our users for support, which keeps us accountable to them first and foremost. We have never accepted private investors and we cannot be pressured to compromise on our values, on user privacy, or on our commitment to publishing 100% open source software, thanks to the generous support of our community.
We are pleased to integrate deeper into the European community, and upgrading the billing system to support the Euro is the next big step in that direction. We are now running almost all of our infrastructure in Europe,2 and moving our revenue to Euro and our business operations to the Netherlands is another step towards completing our move from the United States.
Thank you as always to everyone our community for your generous support – to those who pay for their subscription, but also to the hundreds of people who collaborate with us on our open source codebase, volunteer maintainers of many of SourceHut’s subsystems, and all of the people who host their projects here, or contribute to those projects.
FAQ
Which payment methods are available?
We accept payments in Euro via:
- Credit card
- SEPA direct debit (IBAN)
- iDEAL
- Bancontact
Will you support more currencies?
Yes. The work to make our system multi-currency generalizes to other currencies. We intend to support GBP and JPY soon and we will add others as well. If you would like to request that we prioritize your currency of choice, please email sr.ht-discuss.
Will you support more payment methods?
It depends. We have added all of the Euro-based payment methods that we care to, but as we introduce other currencies we will endeavour to support the payment methods most suitable for those currencies. If you have a payment method you prefer, please email sr.ht-discuss to propose it.
Note that we have already evaluated and elected not to support PayPal and cryptocurrency.
Will you accept cash or bank transfers again?
Once upon a time, we accepted annual payments in cash at each year’s FOSDEM, and we would accept manual bank transfers as well. Both methods have the advantage of not requiring nonfree JavaScript to support. We have not ruled out accepting payments in this manner again in the future, but for right now we have no concrete plans to do so.
I pay in USD now, can I switch to Euro?
Not yet: presently Euro is only accepted for new subscriptions. We will be making it possible to change your payment currency in the near future.
Workaround: if your subscription term ends within the next couple of months, you may cancel your paid subscription and sign up again in Euro when it runs out.
Why is SourceHut moving to Europe?
Drew, speaking for himself:
The most straightforward explanation for why SourceHut is moving to Europe is that, since I moved to the Netherlands, all of SourceHut’s staff live in Europe. And because we don’t use the cloud – we colocate servers that we assembled and own ourselves – it also just made sense to move our infrastructure to Europe, to be located close to the sysadmins responsible for it.
This simple explanation obscures the reasons why I personally moved to Europe. Indeed I moved myself, and SourceHut, to Europe in part for strategic business reasons: the European open source community is stronger than the US, and moreover I believe that we have a competitive advantage in subjecting ourselves to tough European laws and regulations regarding privacy and consumer protections – our users would demand this level of attention to their needs regardless.
There are personal reasons, as well, for moving myself to Europe, thus starting a process that would naturally lead to SourceHut’s business and operations moving with me. When I moved out of the United States, back in 2021, I was moving away from a political and social landscape that I no longer felt comfortable being a part of. I expanded on these feelings in detail on my personal blog at the time. To my dismay, the years since have shown that my foresight in this matter was prudent.
I sleep better knowing that my business isn’t being coerced into complicity with the US Gestapo, or implementing policies that would be letting down our queer and trans users, women, or people of color who use SourceHut. We feel that we can provide a safer service to our community from Europe, moving user data and SourceHut staff out of the reach of US institutions.
What are your plans for winding down the US legal entity?
The process is gradual and conservative, as our revenue and therefore our ability to provide useful services to our customers depended, until now, on our US legal entity being able to process payments. We have adopted a cautious approach to make sure that we continue to have the resources we need to provide reliable service.
All customers who signed up prior to today are still having their payments processed through the US system. Once we establish confidence in the European system we’ve built, and normalized our processes and procedures at low volume, we will prepare to migrate all existing users to the European payment processing system. This is expected to take place by the end of the year.
We have one more server in the US, which is used for off-site backups. Backup data on this server is encrypted in Europe before being sent off-site. We will likely de-provision this server in the foreseeable future, but it is not a particularly high priority.
Once these steps are complete it is our intention to dis-incorporate the US legal entity and cease operations in the United States entirely.