tl;dr: Yes, the system suspends a pledge when you hit your limit. But it’s just a control-point. We hope you’ll feel it’s worth it to increase your limit. If you don’t, maybe it’s fine to just let others donate without you anyway. Regardless, this is far off. Our goal today is to get to where patrons hitting limits is the problem!
We do need to keep working to present the budget context better. The sole purpose is to give patrons a guaranteed control point to not spend more money than they are willing.
In some sense, the ideal would be that you never hit your limit — not because the crowdmatching doesn’t grow but because you keep increasing the limit as you feel more and more that it’s worth it to stay in.
When would you not increase your limit? One case is that you don’t feel some projects need or deserve that much funding, in which case it makes sense to drop out anyway. Another case is that you just truly can’t afford to donate any more. In that case, we indeed do not like the idea of you getting cut out.
If we let you stay in but have no more increase from crowdmatching, it would undermine the mutual assurance. It would be dishonest to say to new patrons that everyone else is helping match them if actually many patrons were just staying at a limit and not matching.
Some of many potential ways we can keep everyone matching but also let you could stay on when you can’t afford to donate any more:
- Project splits into sub-projects so you can support a lower-budget smaller sub-project
- We implement an option such as less-frequent donating (bimonthly, quarterly, annually)
But you might also just be happy that other people are donating so much (it must be happening for you to have hit a limit), and you get to enjoy the results without spending any more money yourself.
See more discussion of this issue at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/limits
Incidentally, we could potentially offer an alternative funding approach. As a different option from authorizing a monthly budget, we could let patrons authorize a one-time larger amount (e.g. $50) and allow monthly crowdmatching to keep going until they’ve donated that total, at which point they’d have to make another authorization to continue. In some sense, the monthly budget is like that but where it renews automatically and doesn’t roll-over the remainder each month.