A subscription to bHive Villages costs a fiver each month. We think that is amazing value. A bargain! Here’s why: 

Pay $5 – Save $1000!

If you borrow a wheelbarrow from a neighbour on Villages, you’re saving $200 on the cost of buying one. That’s pays for 40 months of your Villages subscription. 

If you’re cooking dinner and ask your Village for some herbs, an egg or sugar you save yourself $5. That pays for a month’s Villages subscription. 

You can borrow power tools ($200), bikes ($1000), ladders ($250), board games ($60), books ($20), camping gear ($100s) and more, and each time you’re saving more than a year of Villages subscription. 

So purely on financial terms, if you’re active on Villages you can easily save a thousand dollars a year. 

Convenience? Priceless.

You’re cooking and don’t have an egg. You ask your Village and five minutes later you have one. You’ve had a smile from a neighbour too. You’ve just saved yourself a trip into town.

You have just had a baby and the street plans a cooking roster for you. Life savers!

You’re wondering how to prune your apricot tree and forty minutes later an expert neighbour is showing you how. 

You’re trying to clear out some stuff you no longer need and ten minutes later a neighbour you trust has taken it. No more bickering and trolls from the blue platform. 

You’re heading out for dinner at the last minute and a babysitter from within your Village responds to your call out and turns up ten minutes later. 

Helping others feels great. Priceless

Your stuff is currently sitting in the shed for 90% of its lifetime.  Share it with your Village: You’ll feel great helping the neighbours finish their projects, fix their houses and plant their veggie gardens. If you give a bit more than you take in Villages you’ll have a great experience. 

You’re in Control. Priceless.

You control which neighbours and friends are in your Village. You control what information you put on the platform and who borrows your stuff and skills. You participate when and where you want. You arrange with your neighbours to share stuff when it suits. You can set up local events you want and can plan things of interest to you. 

Connect to Communities across Bendigo. Priceless.

You can set up, join and participate in interest-based communities across Bendigo. You’ll see all their posts, not just one ones some strange algorithm decides to show you. 

Belonging? Priceless

In this year of COVID we have really understood the value of community and of neighbours. We have missed loved ones and really understand what that means for our mental health. The Harvard Medical School research team in the early 2000s found that having strong links into your community adds ten years to lifespan and is better for your health than giving up smoking, alcohol and fat. Find the others around you and the impact will be priceless. 

Your $5 stays local, creating many times the value

Your $5 will stay in Bendigo. Your $5 will pay for the technology to be improved, for local wages and for the next local bHive project. Villages is just the beginning for bHive. We have big plans to build local cooperative enterprises in Bendigo. Your $5 will help create meaningful local work, localise spending and localise ownership of our economy. Money spent locally circulates through local families and can have many times the local value of $1 spent at a global corporation. What goes around locally comes around too. 

Eradicating Poverty and restoring the Ecology. Priceless. 

Giving back to the community – 4% of your $5 goes to local projects that aim to eradicate the causes of poverty locally and restore the ecology locally. We call this the bottom line. 

The big tech platforms are NOT free.

They sell our data, advertise at us and emotionally manipulate us with the content we see. They sway elections and attempt to shape us as consumers. They are owned by the biggest billionaires in the world, who just keep getting richer whilst avoiding tax, removing jobs and worker rights and conditions. On bHive Villages, you’re a human being and a neighbour, not a “product” or a “consumer” or a “customer”. 

Comparing Subscriptions … $5 is great value

We already pay $20 to the billionaires for music and they don’t pay the artists properly. We pay the billionaires $15 to store our back ups in the cloud. We pay $20 to stream TV.  We pay $70 to access broadband and $60 to research our ancestors. We pay $30 to listen to famous people reading meditations and $16 for a dubious weight loss program. Five bucks for Villages is great value! 

Own your own platform? Priceless

Your subscription of $5 goes to the bHive Cooperative Bendigo. Cooperatives are democratically governed and operate with one member = one vote. You can become a member and an equal owner too. Then you own your own platform. 

Because brilliant people think bHive is a powerful tool

Villages is ready and waiting …

We hope you can see the value of your fiver. Subscribe to Villages and start saving here.