SPI credit cards for regular billing, specifically AWS costs

[Peter Cock]

Dear SPI,

I am the current treasurer and SPI liaison for the
Open Bioinformatics Foundation. One of our major
ongoing costs is hosting fees for the Amazon cloud
computing platform (Amazon web services, AWS),
where we currently run several servers including
our own mailman instance.

Paying for AWS requires a credit card on file.
Currently we use the personal card of one of our
former treasurers, and submit batched expense
claims periodically.

I personally do not have a USD credit card account,
so taking on this role myself would have the additional
complication and personal financial risk of currency
fluctuations.

What would be ideal from our point of view as an
SPI member project, would be to have use of an
SPI credit card for our AWS billing.

This would likely also reduce the burden on the SPI
treasurer by avoiding the current expenses claims.

I note that credit cards or related payment services
are not currently listed as being offered:

http://spi-inc.org/projects/services/

Is this something the SPI could assist us with?

Are any of the other SPI projects in a similar position
with AWS billing?

Thank you,

Peter

--

Dr. Peter Cock,
Open Bioinformatics Foundation, board of directors, treasurer