We finally wrapped up the finances of the Liberated Pixel Cup. Several people have asked: where did the money go? That's a fair question! In fact, I have kept very careful financial records since the start of the project using some wonderful software called ledger. It was my original intent to relelease the entire ledger file to the public, but one large donor asked us to not disclose their exact amount, so instead in the interest of transparency I'll break down some of the expenses information.

$ ledger -f pixelcup.ldgr bal expenses --depth 2
           $12478.22  Expenses
            $4730.40    Artists
            $1247.82    FSF overhead
            $6500.00    Prizes

So that's the total expenses for Liberated Pixel Cup. Most of the money is going to prizes, followed by payments to the artists who worked on the base artwork and styleguide, followed by 10% of the money going to FSF overhead (when handling the funding of projects like this, the FSF charges 10% overhead to handle routing and fees… consider it a 10% donation to the FSF, but really given the large amount of time involved in handling the fundraising, finances, taxes, and other things, it's peanuts). So that's exactly the amount of money that went out.

In case you were wondering if we were pocketing the money, in fact the exact opposite is true. Bart Kelsey and I, who worked together to kick off the project and I think it is fair to say that Liberated Pixel Cup is mutually "our baby"… well, we didn't get any money out of it. In fact, from the outset, a good cunk of LPC's funding came from our own wallets.

$ ledger -f pixelcup.ldgr bal pledge
           $-2222.22  Income:Pledged funding
           $-1000.00    Bart Kelsey
           $-1222.22    Chris Webber

(BartK and I pledged the same amount; the reason for the $222.22 extra donation from my end is due to an extra donation from me rounding out a bit of the final budget in a form that's too boring to explain here.)

But anyway, now you know!