Registration to a group subject to payment of a recursive fee

I've given thought to this in the past as well in terms of possible integration with OpenCollective, which social.coop uses for contributions.

On further reflection, this actually could contain the seed of an interesting "business model" for Loomio for associative/dues-type online groups, if people paid their dues through Loomio, with the Loomio co-op taking a small % rather than a set monthly fee?

Really interesting idea for a group like Social.Coop

Interesting idea. It"s a sort of a distributed way of payment of the Loomio service. That's paid by group members through percentuage on dues instead by group coordinator.

Exactly; it could allow for groups and payments to scale proportionally rather than making judgement on fixed pricing levels. I wonder if some sort of revenue-share arrangement could be set-up with OpenCollective, as they already have the payments infrastructure in place?

This would definitely hit a social.coop pain-point.

cc: @michaelelwoodsmith

I understand how this could be good for some groups. Here are my initial thoughts:

• groups without central funds are a very small proportion of our target market groups and this would not significantly affect our profitability. We have good research showing that the majority of our potential customers have centralized funds.
• there is an incredible amount of work making a good UX to chase (or not?) people about contributing a very small amount each. and I expect each group would want different behaviour around this.
• If this was built, it would be something that would be useful for a number of apps, not just Loomio.
• Our pricing is not per-person, it's in tiers, and it's probably less than $10 per person, per year... however I guess we could invent a new model which is $5/year/person.
• When payments are very small, transaction fees make up a large proportion of the fee, at $5/per person we don't actually make any money.

So this model is not something which would benefit Loomio, we'd be better off giving it away or making it very inexpensive for these groups - and that is what we do with our unfunded community group offer and the open source code.

If money is a barrier to people using Loomio, we'll find the most cost effective way to support them, however we would rather focus on decision making features in 2019 (which are going to be really awesome, btw), than billing administration systems.

Hope this does not sound like I'm being unfairly negative, I would love to believe in this idea, but I really don't, only because of all the efforts we've already made in the past in this space - which include donation drives and many other efforts.

I think I really do like this idea, it's just quite hard, based upon experience.

Another idea -
If at least 10% of you group (or something) is paying individual subscriptions then your group is paid for.

Personal subscriptions would be well above the transaction costs, and charged yearly. Say, between 20 and 50 for the year.

This way people can buy a personal subscription and their membership impacts all the groups they belong to. They can even buy a subscription just because they like loomio.