Open Collective Foundation Shut Down: What Are Your Options Now?

On December 31, 2024, Open Collective Foundation officially dissolved. Over 600 collectives lost their fiscal host: mutual aid groups, open source projects, tenant unions, and a long tail of small grassroots outfits. Millions of dollars in community funds had to be spent down, moved elsewhere, or handed back to donors.

If you were one of those groups, you lived through the scramble and don't need it recapped. If you weren't, the story is still worth your time, because it is the clearest recent illustration of what it costs to keep your community's money inside somebody else's institution.

OCF's dissolution wasn't sudden, but it was fast once the announcement came:

• Late 2023: Internal financial pressures mount. OCF had been operating at a deficit, with its 5% host fee insufficient to cover the operational costs of serving hundreds of collectives with varying needs and compliance requirements.
• Early 2024: OCF announces it will wind down. Hundreds of groups that treated OCF as their legal and financial home find out at the same time as everyone else.
• March 15, 2024: Last day to receive new donations through OCF. No new money in.
• June 30, 2024: Last employees depart. The organization transitions to wind-down mode with minimal staff handling remaining disbursements.
• September 30, 2024: Spend-down deadline. Collectives must have a plan to use remaining funds, transfer them to another fiscal host, or return them to donors.
• December 31, 2024: OCF officially dissolves. Any remaining funds are distributed according to dissolution protocols.

OCF charged a 5% fee on all contributions to its hosted collectives. That reads as reasonable, and next to fiscal sponsors charging 8 to 15% it reads as generous. The math still didn't work, and it's worth walking through why, because the same trap catches other platforms.

Fiscal hosting is expensive to run. For every collective on the books, OCF had to:

• Maintain legal compliance as the collective's fiscal agent
• Process reimbursements and disbursements (often manually reviewed)
• Handle tax filings and 1099 reporting
• Respond to support requests from hundreds of volunteer-run groups
• Manage bank accounts, payment processors, and reconciliation
• Perform due diligence on how funds were being used

Put a number on it. A collective moving $10,000 a year generated $500 in fees, and that $500 had to cover compliance, tax filings, reconciliation, and however many support emails that group sent. One complicated reimbursement question can eat $500 of staff time. Most OCF collectives were far smaller than $10,000, so for a large share of the roster the fee revenue wasn't within range of the cost of service.

Bigger collectives subsidized the rest, which works right up until it doesn't. OCF ran a structural deficit, meaning the gap widened as it grew rather than closing. Signing up more collectives made the problem worse. That is the part worth remembering: the 5% fee wasn't priced wrong by a little, it was priced wrong in a direction that scale couldn't fix.

A confusion worth clearing up: Open Collective Foundation and the Open Collective platform were separate things, and only one of them went away. The platform, meaning the website where collectives track their budgets, kept running. Open Collective Inc. became OFiCo (Open Financial Collective, Inc.), which took over stewardship of it.

The platform still exists and still hosts collectives under other fiscal hosts. What vanished was the organizational home underneath it: the 501(c)(3) status, the bank accounts, the compliance apparatus. The dashboard survived. The legal entity holding the money did not.

For groups that used OCF, the platform transition meant their public page and transaction history could persist, but they needed a new entity to actually hold and disburse their funds.

OCF's dissolution hit a wide range of communities:

• Mutual aid groups that relied on OCF for tax-exempt status and transparent financial management. Many of these groups operate on thin margins and lack the capacity to incorporate independently.
• Open source projects that used OCF to accept donations and pay contributors. Without a fiscal host, accepting corporate sponsorships becomes legally complicated.
• Community organizations, including neighborhood groups, tenant unions, and immigrant support networks, that needed 501(c)(3) status to be eligible for foundation grants.
• Event organizers and collectives using OCF as a lightweight alternative to incorporating.

For a lot of these groups this was an existential threat rather than a paperwork headache, because a group that cannot legally hold money cannot pay a landlord or buy groceries. Worth sitting with the timing, too: the scramble for a new host happened while these groups were still running distributions and answering requests. Nobody got to pause operations to sort out their fiscal sponsorship.

If you're a collective hunting for a new fiscal home, or a new group working out how to handle money at all, four options are realistically on the table.

1. Hack Club Foundation

Originally created to support youth coding projects, Hack Club Foundation has expanded to host a broader range of collectives and community projects. They offer fiscal sponsorship with transparent financial management through the HCB (Hack Club Bank) platform. Fees are competitive, and the platform is designed for transparency. The limitation: their mission focus means not every type of collective is a good fit.

2. Other fiscal hosts on the Open Collective platform

The platform supports plenty of fiscal hosts besides the defunct OCF. Some are regional, tied to a particular city or country. Others are thematic, focused on open source or social justice work. Fees run wider than OCF's did, usually 8 to 10% and occasionally 15%, which is the honest price of the service. Continuity is the real draw here: if you were already on the platform, moving to a new host keeps your transaction history and public page intact.

3. Self-incorporation

Some collectives used OCF's dissolution as motivation to incorporate as their own nonprofit. This gives you complete control but comes with significant overhead:

• Filing for 501(c)(3) status costs $275-$600 in IRS fees^[1] and takes 3-12 months
• You'll need bylaws, a board of directors, and annual filings
• Ongoing compliance includes annual Form 990 filing, state registrations, and potentially an audit
• You'll need your own bank account, accounting system, and someone to manage it all

For groups processing $100,000+ per year with stable leadership, self-incorporation can make sense. For smaller, volunteer-run mutual aid groups, the overhead usually isn't worth it.

4. Community-owned infrastructure

The dissolution exposed something structural. When one organization controls your financial infrastructure, its balance sheet becomes your risk, and you find out about that risk when the wind-down email arrives.

The alternative taking shape is community-owned financial infrastructure: platforms accountable to the groups using them rather than to a parent nonprofit's books. In practice that means:

• Financial tools owned and governed by the communities that use them
• Transparent operations where users can see how the platform sustains itself
• Distributed architecture that doesn't create a single point of failure
• Governance mechanisms that give communities a voice in platform decisions

The closure taught the organizing world a few things it would rather have learned some other way.

1. Platform dependency is organizational risk. Any tool, platform, or fiscal host can shut down, change terms, or raise fees. Groups need to plan for this the way they plan for any other risk.
2. Low fees can be a trap. The 5% rate drew hundreds of collectives in and never covered the service. Cheap is genuinely good until the cheap option evaporates and you have ninety days to find a replacement.
3. Fiscal sponsorship concentrates risk. When one organization hosts 600+ collectives, its dissolution becomes a systemic event. Diversifying across multiple fiscal hosts or building independent capacity reduces this concentration risk.
4. Transitions need to be planned, not reactive. Groups with governance structures and documented financial processes handled the transition better than groups where one person held all the institutional knowledge.
5. Community infrastructure should be community-owned. None of this was a failure of effort on OCF's part; by all accounts they worked hard at it. The model was the problem. One nonprofit, funded by thin fees, holding the financial lives of hundreds of groups, is a single point of failure no amount of good intent removes.

If you're a collective displaced by OCF's closure, or a new group trying to avoid the same trap:

• Audit your current setup. Where does your money live? Who controls access? What happens if that person or platform disappears?
• Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Maintain relationships with at least two financial platforms or fiscal hosts. Keep reserves accessible through a backup channel.
• Document your governance. Groups that survived the OCF transition best had written decision-making processes, multiple signatories, and institutional knowledge that didn't depend on one person. See our governance guide for a practical framework.
• Ask how the platform pays for itself. The cheapest option today may not exist in eighteen months. Before you commit, work out whether the fee could plausibly cover the service you're being promised. If it obviously can't, you are looking at a future wind-down email.

Browse the Goodkeep directory to find mutual aid groups near you and see how they've adapted since OCF's closure.