How We Spent 279.372,23 € (Patreon)

When you first get 300.000€ seems like a lot. Even writing it down is a challenge, three-hundred-thousands Euro. Or at least seems a lot to us. But as things start rolling, you quickly realise how fast money gets spent, especially during research and development.


We like to stay as transparent as possible with everything, including our finances. Open source finances one might say! Below we’ll cover a few aspects, data and infographics of the Precious Plastic Version 4 Financial Report. You can also find the full report here if you’re interested. 

Key Points
- Version 4 development ran from July 2018 to January 7th 2020
- The funding came from Famae foundation as part of their “Don’t Trash Your Cash” 2018 challenge. Precious Plastic was awarded 300,000 euro as a winner of this award.
- There was one staff member paid (Mattia) to help develop Version 4, but everyone one else who worked on it was a volunteer (100+ people contributed). Dave was paid with Patreon.
- Precious Plastic provided food and housing for people who came to Eindhoven to volunteer their time and skills.

So how we spent the money
As expected most money was spent in the workspace category. A total of 93.000€ or about 29% of the total budget. Developing machines cost quite some money (and time). Tools, machines, materials and machining jobs all tend to be quite pricey. And we made ourselves a little present buying a robot arm to research automatic sorting, that alone was 15.000€. 

Second up was the kitchen with about 43.000€. Feeding 40+ people over a period of time of more than 18 months quickly adds up. Particularly if, like in our case, you decide to purchase as much organic and local food as possible (refusing to support damaging food systems).  

Third was living with 32.000€. Living cost includes paying rent for the 10+ due-to-be-demolished houses (15.000€) and the electricity and gas bills associated with them.  Remarkably cheap if you think that average rent in Eindhoven is 500-600€ per month per person. 

How we improved over time
First few months were a little chaotic as our team went from 3 people to 40 in the space of a few weeks. We had no experience scaling. We had to learn a lot. Also, these were the setup months, where more money went into setting up the infrastructure. Houses, furnishing, kitchen, workspace, tools, materials and more.  We had financial plans, forecasts and area budgets but were difficult to follow. 

By March 2019 we had set up area managers (workspace, design, kitchen etc..) with respective budgets to follow. This was a turning point where finances started to make more sense and get under control. 



Conclusions
Considering our inexperience and experimental approach always trying new things we think it is an incredible success that we managed to stay within budget. Quite neatly. Thank you Joseph. There were times where we were quite anxious and doubted but thanks to all the volunteers' cooperation and a few key decisions everything worked out pretty good. And if you consider the extracted value from the 300.000€ I doubt we could have ever done any better.