Open Books
We run at cost and take no profit. This page shows exactly what we charge, what it costs us to run the service, and where every penny goes. No other music platform does this. We do.
4
Total Members
2
Artists
2
Patrons
0
Events Funded
£5/mo
Artist Pro
Platform operations — hosting, storage, security
£2/mo
Listener Patron
Patron Fund — live events, venue hire, local charities
£5/mo
DJ
Platform operations — catalogue access, API, hosting
£10/mo
Radio Station
Platform operations — priority access, bulk export, API
10p/MB
One rate. Every track.
Where it goes: 100% to the artist. Music United takes zero commission from audio sales.
Why this rate: 10p per megabyte is the real cost of storing and delivering audio files. The price is the size of the file — nothing more.
Processing fees: Stripe's payment processing fee is currently deducted by Stripe from each transaction. We are working towards a fixed monthly arrangement to eliminate this.
Every service Music United uses has a real cost. Here is exactly what we pay for and why. These are the costs that subscription fees cover — nothing else.
Hosting & Compute
Vercel — the servers that run the website, handle API requests, and serve pages to every visitor.
Scales with trafficDatabase
Supabase — stores every profile, every track, every event, every community project. Authentication and security live here.
Scales with dataAudio Storage
Backblaze B2 — where your music files live. Reliable, redundant, and a fraction of the cost of the big cloud providers.
Scales with uploadsContent Delivery (Cloudflare)
Cloudflare Pro — caching, DDoS protection, and a global edge network. Bandwidth is free thanks to the Cloudflare Bandwidth Alliance with Backblaze B2 — no delivery cost exists.
$0 bandwidthPayment Processing
Stripe — handles all payments securely. Stripe charges a per-transaction fee that we are working to replace with a fixed monthly deal.
Working to eliminateDomain & DNS
The musicunited.co.uk domain, DNS routing, and SSL certificates that keep the site secure and reachable.
Fixed costMusic Licensing (PPL UK)
Our PPL UK Small Webcaster Licence — the legal right to stream recorded music. We pay our licence fees so artists and listeners never have to worry about compliance.
Annual licenceArtist Pro, DJ, and Radio Station subscriptions fund platform operations — the hosting, database, storage, and security infrastructure listed above.
The goal is simple: subscription revenue = running costs. No surplus is extracted as profit. If costs go down (which they do as the community grows and we negotiate better rates), subscription prices go down too.
The pledge: if our costs go down, your price goes down. We do not keep the difference.
Listener Patron subscriptions go directly into the Patron Fund. Every patron-funded event is fully managed by the Patron Fund Manager — they book the venue, book the artists, set up the tickets, handle every transaction, and pay all bills from the fund. This money is used exclusively for:
Music United does not take any portion of patron subscription revenue for platform operations.
This is not marketing — it is live platform data. Every subscription pound is allocated to one of two pots. Nothing is extracted as profit.
Operations
£10.00/mo
Artist Pro, DJ, and Radio Station subscriptions fund hosting, storage, security, and the tools that keep the platform running.
Patron Fund
£0.00/mo
Every penny of Listener Patron revenue goes to community events, artist fees, venue hire, and local charities.
0
Projects
0 completed
£0.00
Allocated
All time
£0.00
Spent
Events & venues
£0.00
To Charity
Local charities
Leftover project funds always go to local charities in the event area — never back to the platform.
The platform is in its early growth phase. The founder covers the shortfall. As the community grows, the model becomes self-sustaining — and that journey is shown here, live.
Music United is currently privately financed. Infrastructure costs are covered out of pocket and every team member works for free.
Nobody draws a salary. Nobody takes expenses. The platform exists because the people building it believe in what it can become — and they are willing to fund it until it stands on its own.
The commitment: all work on Music United is undertaken for free by staff until the platform generates enough revenue to sustain itself. This is not a startup burning investment — it is people building something they believe in.
When the platform's revenue can support it, this is the team we plan to hire. Every role at the same salary — no executive pay gap.
£34333.33/mo
£412000.00/yr
Take a commission
We will never take a percentage of artist revenue, ticket sales, or audio purchases.
Sell your data
We will never sell, broker, or share user data with advertisers, data brokers, or third parties.
Run advertisements
There will never be ads on Music United. You are not the product.
License your music
We will never licence your catalogue to third parties or use it to train AI models without your explicit consent.
Extract profit
Music United runs at cost. If there is surplus, it goes to reducing prices or funding community projects.
Lock you in
No exit fees, no penalties for leaving, no barriers to downloading your own data.
Transparency is only meaningful if it is verifiable. Here is how you can confirm that we are doing what we say:
The financial data on this page updates automatically as the community grows. Revenue, costs, surplus — all live. The books are open. Always.