What Does It Cost to Run a Library of Things? (And How to Fund It)

This is the first question almost everyone asks me, and it's the right one. A library of things is a beautiful idea, but ideas don't pay rent. If you want yours to still be open in three years, you have to understand what it costs and where the money comes from.

I'm not going to give you a single magic number, because anyone who does is lying to you. What it costs to run a sharing library in rural Iceland is not what it costs in central London or suburban Ontario. But I can tell you exactly what you'll be paying for, what pushes those costs up and down, and what I've actually learned about funding it, having done it the hard way.

What you're actually paying for

Think of the costs in a few buckets.

Space. Somewhere to store and lend your items from. This is often the biggest and least flexible cost, because it usually comes with a lease. It's also the one I'd push you hardest to keep small at the start. We had to move our tool library five times during COVID, and every move taught me not to over-commit to space too early. A corner of an existing community centre, a room inside a public library, a shared spot in a co-working space: all of these beat signing your own expensive lease before you know your demand.

The items themselves. Here's the good news. Your inventory can start almost free. Most of what filled our early shelves was donated or rescued and then repaired. Our very first donation was over 500 items from one person. So this cost can be tiny if you're willing to put the word out and do some cleaning and fixing. Where it grows is maintenance: things break, and keeping them working is an ongoing cost, not a one-off.

People. This is the big one, and it's where I have strong opinions, so I've given it its own section below.

The system that runs it. However you track who has what, when it's due, and who's paid: that's a real cost, whether it's your time doing it manually or software doing it for you. Automated systems (like ours) carry a subscription cost, but they replace something that was never actually free, which is hours of a paid person's time.

The boring essentials. Insurance, utilities, basic admin, a way to take payments. Easy to forget when you're dreaming, impossible to ignore once you're open.

Notice what this list does: almost every cost can be scaled up or down depending on your choices. That's the real answer to "what does it cost." It costs as much as the model you choose, and choosing a lean model deliberately is the single biggest thing in your control.

The cost that decides whether you survive: people

Most libraries of things try to solve the people cost by running on volunteers. I understand why. When there's no money, free help feels like the only option.

I made a different choice, and I'd make it again. From the start, we paid our people. Here's why. A library has opening hours. It makes real, repeated demands on people's time. Run that on volunteers long enough and they burn out, or get hurt in the process, or start to feel taken advantage of. I've watched genuinely good projects collapse, not because the idea failed, but because the people holding it up got exhausted.

So when I think about cost, I don't think of paying people as the expense to avoid. I think of it as the expense that keeps the whole thing alive. If your model only works because people work for free forever, it doesn't really work. It's just borrowing against someone's goodwill until it runs out.

If you genuinely can't pay people yet, at least be honest about that fragility and design around it, which usually means automating the repetitive work so the humans you do have aren't drowning in check-in and check-out.

Now the part I know well: how to fund it

I've spent years funding community projects as an immigrant woman who can't even get a business credit card here, let alone a bank loan for something the finance world keeps calling "not a bankable project." So I've had to get good at the parts of funding that don't depend on walking into a bank. Here's what actually works.

One practical note before the advice: finding the grants in the first place is half the battle, so we built a Funding Hub to gather grants and partnership opportunities in one place. It's worth a look before you start, so you're not hunting blind.

Chop it into small bits. This is the most useful thing I can tell you. Don't apply for the whole project in one giant grant. Break it into small, specific pieces and fund them one at a time. Smaller asks are easier to win, and they come with cleaner, more achievable deliverables. A lot of our grant success came precisely because we applied for sections, not the whole dream.

Treat grants as work, not free money. A grant is not a gift. It comes with reports, spending you have to justify, and financing you have to track, and that's genuinely hard when you're juggling several at once. Budget the admin time, not just the money.

Always have several applications running. You will not win them all. Apply for many small things for different parts of the project, and expect a patchwork. We once applied for two million ISK and got two hundred thousand ISK. You take the two hundred, you're honest about what that smaller amount can realistically deliver, and you go find the rest.

Be radically honest with funders. If you're given less than you asked for, tell them plainly what you can and can't do with it. I've told funders outright: I can't deliver what I promised on this smaller amount, so here's what I'll actually do, and if I can't find the rest by year's end, I'll return the money. That honesty builds the kind of trust that gets you funded again. What kills people is taking the money, panicking, and spending it on the wrong things to justify having it.

Treat "no" as information, not defeat. If a rejection comes with feedback, that's gold. If it doesn't, go and ask for it. The worst they can say is that they don't give feedback, and if a funder makes you spend forty hours on an application and won't tell you why you lost, that's worth knowing too.

Look into co-funding with your own time. Many grants let you count your own work hours as part of your contribution, which can mean you need to supply far less cash than you assumed, sometimes none. A lot of people simply don't know this option exists.

Grants aren't the only route: crowdfunding

Grants are powerful, but they're not the only way, and they're not always the fastest. Don't overlook crowdfunding, especially at the very start.

I know it works because it's how the original Reykjavík Tool Library got off the ground. I launched a crowdfunding campaign from a hospital bed with a genuinely shitty website, and by the time I was discharged we were halfway to our goal. That funding is what let us rent a space and start collecting tools.

Crowdfunding does something a grant can't: it proves demand. When people in your own community put their own money in, you've shown, to yourself and to any future funder, that this is wanted. It also builds your first community of supporters before you've lent a single item, and it creates a lovely obligation. Once people have backed you, you have to deliver, and that pressure is useful.

We believe in it enough that we run a crowdfunding page to help projects in our world get started this way. If grants feel slow or out of reach right now, this is often the more immediate path to your first shelves.

One last thing about money and community

I'll leave you with the belief underneath all of this. We're far too comfortable expecting community work to be free. We happily fund activities and technology and equipment, but we hesitate to fund the actual people holding these projects together. I think that's backwards. If you believe a sharing library should exist in your community, then part of the answer to "what does it cost" is: it costs enough to pay the people who make it real, and that's worth funding.

If you want the exhaustive planning-and-budgeting checklist, Shareable's Library of Things Toolkit goes deep on governance and budgets. And if you want to cut the single largest recurring cost, staff time spent on manual check-in and check-out, that's exactly what our software and hardware are built to do. You can see the full picture here.

Anna De Matos, Founder & CEO, Circular Library Network