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Discussion on: Ads or Donations - what you prefer to gain money with your site?

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aleixmorgadas profile image
Aleix Morgadas

I'm also thinking about Donations model to support a web application.

Have you considered a model like opencollective.com or patreon.com ?

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rodiongork profile image
Rodion Gorkovenko

Thanks for the links! I studied both briefly but feel that probably I'm not ready for either. The first seems to mean being over-scrupulous - this is good, but when I imaging describing like "got $40 from ..., sent t-shirt as reward, t-shirt cost $14, postal expenses $7" (not including cost of my time spent in post-office) - or deciding whether it is correct to pay from these money for expenses on some satellite web-project (e.g. also eductational, also about programming - but not related directly to the first site, like cp-algorithms). That is too difficult level of detalization to maintain easily.

The second seems to mean exactly what it says - levels of paid membership - and that is what I want never to happen. As web-site is educational, not really commercial - I prefer that any education opportunity is equally accessible to everyone, and this means free. Though perhaps they suggest some "elevated" or "honorable" membership which could be just an option not related to functionality. I'll see more about this, thanks!

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aleixmorgadas profile image
Aleix Morgadas

Yeah... Find a donation method that matches the values and vision of an open source project is challenging.

Another approach is github.com/sponsors, my opinion about sponsors that that seems strange that you support and individual over a project.

When building a community, for me it's better if I support the whole project over an individual. In case the main maintainer leaves the project, supporting the project as a whole seems more probable that it continues alive by other members of the community.

But I understand that you, as a main maintainer/contributor, you would like to receive some money compensation for your work.

Hard to choose and even harder to monetize via Donations ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I hope you the best with trying a new monetization model ( ᐛ )و