Every member is required to keep with us a deposit equal to the current estimate of three months' hosting costs at the lowest pledge level. This comes out to $21 at the time of this writing. Your deposit amount is displayed on the front page of the portal.
Your balance is the amount of money you've sent us so far, minus your deposit, minus all charges billed to you so far.
- If your balance becomes negative and stays that way for three months, the Board of Directors may vote you out of the cooperative, and will definitely do so if you haven't contacted us asking for some kind of special exemption.
- Since getting in touch with people over the Internet can be much more complicated than it seems at first, we try to help you out by doing what we can to get your attention when your membership is in danger of being terminated. Specifically, when you can only survive one more month of dues without reaching a point where you've paid less than you've been charged, we will try to disable all of your services hosted with HCoop that aren't needed for e-mail communication.
This shouldn't come as a surprise to you if you're putting a minimal amount of effort into staying in good standing with HCoop. We send automated e-mail reminders every month to people who are within two months of dipping into negative balance territory. Naturally, it's important that you keep your HCoop e-mail set up properly so that you receive these e-mails. See the discussion of this in the first parts of MemberManual/GettingStarted/AccountCreated for further information.
If you have a pledge amount above 1, it will be reset to 1 before proceeding if a new charge would make your balance negative.
Miscellaneous exceptions:
- New members only need to send us US$10 to open accounts. A new member has a one-month grace period when we won't enforce any of the above rules. After the first month of membership ends, it's business as usual, with no modifications to the rules to take into account that a "free month" just ended. New members will also receive the same low balance reminder e-mails as everyone else when applicable, even if those messages might contain warnings that are inaccurate because of this exception.
As with all aspects of HCoop, the board of directors is open to requests to accommodate special circumstances. Open a Bugzilla bug in the "Financial" category to make a request.