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> The "donate please" button is just going to be ignored, I'm sure the "donate please" button will be mostly ignored, but putting a "pay what you want" before
by imron 11y ago
> The "donate please" button is just going to be ignored,
I'm sure the "donate please" button will be mostly ignored, but putting a "pay what you want" before the download button will not be.
Way back when, I wrote a windows IME for typing Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks (https://www.pinyinput.net https://www.pinyinput.net) and for years just had a "Donate" button on the site.
In the first 6 years of release, I could count on two hands the number of donations it received (despite tens of thousands of downloads).
Then I changed the site so instead of having both a download and a donate button that it just had a "purchase" button and a "pay what you want" field with a suggested price of $5, with $0 allowed if you want.
It's still essentially the same setup as before - you can download it for free or you can make a donation, but now by explicitly asking, every day or two someone makes a "purchase" - sometimes only a dollar, sometimes $5, once even $50.
Sure, with this setup, Caddy probably won't make as much as if they offered paid support plans, however they will almost certainly make more than they did with just a "donate" button up the top of the page.
- muraiki 11y agoUbuntu does something similar, but since they work on many things they let you decide how to split things up. What's interesting to me is that they show a cost comparision at the bottom, such as $5 being the same as the cost of a pint of beer. This really helps the user realize something like "I buy a pint at the bar without thinking, why can't I give the same amount to software I use every day?" http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute/?version=14.04.4&architecture=amd64 http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/contribute/?version=1...