Thirst Order

Phasma: Aw that’s sweet!

They also spent a good amount of the rest of the 30% budget on significant server overhaul costs. 

AO3 is literally a service you get for free and the audacity you’d have to not bother reading the very open budget plan they have, but to then bitch and whine about people donating to keep the site running is wild. 

hosts millions and millions of fanfiction at no cost to site users

hosts millions and millions user accounts at no cost to site users

is an extremely high traffic site that rarely, if ever, experiences crashes

is an extremely high traffic site that could profit immensely off ads, but keeps the entire site free of ads

maintains a consistent and elaborate tagging system that allows users easy navigation through fanworks

maintains a simple layout structure so the entire site is easy to read, easy to navigate, and easy to understand making it highly accessible to users – especially disabled users

maintains and updates the budget for users to know exactly where their donations are going to be used in the future and have been used in the past

works with the legal aspects of fanworks in order to keep their site and their users completely legal, and therefore not at risk of being shut down, or sued, or manipulated by large media/companies

works with users when it comes to decision making, includes members in voting processes, etc.

literally hosts millions of fanfiction at no cost whatsoever and doesn’t subject you to ads, honestly those are the only two points you need but the other ones are there to show how much they’re doing 

y’all need to appreciate that – donations are completely optional and if you don’t want to donate then don’t, but spreading posts about how Archive doesn’t do anything for anyone and doesn’t do anything with all this money they’re getting is completely unnecessary and outright false.

1.569.000 users

by asking for 130k dollar 2-3 times a year, that means they ask each account holding user for about 0,08 dollar 2-3 times a year -> 0,25 dollar altogether. this doesn’t even factor in the millions of users who don’t have an account but visit ao3, cos if they pitch in as well, it’ll be even less for everyone who enjoys the access ao3 provides to 4.000.000 fanworks and to create more every day!

queerlyalex above has already listed all or most of the terrific services ao3 provides, but right now the legal advocacy efforts they maintain cannot be emphasized enough: european copyright reform article 13 anyone? same for canada and australia? or fighting for net neutrality since 2014?

I am UTTERLY FLABBERGASTED that anyone thinks that running a site hosting millions of fanworks, transferring literally BILLIONS of bytes of data for millions of users could be done for as little as $130K/year. The sense of entitlement is staggering.

No changes? Well, all their code is written by volunteers. Want change to happen faster? Volunteer to join the coding team.

Kylo : Thank you. His name is Armitage.

Hux :

Alucard without his top