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How do you know donations will keep up with usage? I felt like the OP was referring to a situation where Tildes takes off and becomes large organically. I'm cu

by city41 7y ago

How do you know donations will keep up with usage? I felt like the OP was referring to a situation where Tildes takes off and becomes large organically. I'm currently building a site that I am considering attempting to make possible via donations, much like Tildes. Any advice you can share? How well have donations been working? Any gotchas? Thanks for any insights you can share!

_ps6d 7y ago
You can see the site's current expenses and donations here: https://tildes.net/financials https://tildes.net/financials The costs to keep it running are already covered by over 10x with the current donations, and I believe the existing servers could easily handle at least 100x the current traffic level. In terms of advice, I'd say: - Don't go into debt (or take any investments) to launch the site. - Build something lightweight so the costs are low. Use dedicated server(s), avoid cloud hosting like AWS. - Incorporate as a non-profit if you can.
- stevewodil 7y ago
  +1 for transparency of financials, that's a really awesome idea
nexuist 7y ago
Not OP but server costs are not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. A $5 DO droplet can easily sustain 500-1000 active users. If you were doing video or audio streaming I could see concerns, but at the core of it all the server is doing is reading and writing strings and that's not a very intensive process. A $200/mo server could handle millions of daily visits, and you'd likely not grow further than that without running into the actual wall: labor. That's where things get dicey. You have to pay people, and ideally yourself, for the labor you invest into the project. As Tildes is a non profit it's already clear that the developer is building it out of love and not a desire to sustain his or her lifestyle. If the developer wanted a developer salary or enough income to hire another developer, though, I agree that donations wouldn't be adequate enough. That's when you turn to selling features (i.e. Reddit coins) or selling ads.

by city41 7y ago

_ps6d 7y ago

You can see the site's current expenses and donations here: https://tildes.net/financials https://tildes.net/financials The costs to keep it running are already covered by over 10x with the current donations, and I believe the existing servers could easily handle at least 100x the current traffic level. In terms of advice, I'd say: - Don't go into debt (or take any investments) to launch the site. - Build something lightweight so the costs are low. Use dedicated server(s), avoid cloud hosting like AWS. - Incorporate as a non-profit if you can.

stevewodil 7y ago
+1 for transparency of financials, that's a really awesome idea

nexuist 7y ago

Not OP but server costs are not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. A $5 DO droplet can easily sustain 500-1000 active users. If you were doing video or audio streaming I could see concerns, but at the core of it all the server is doing is reading and writing strings and that's not a very intensive process. A $200/mo server could handle millions of daily visits, and you'd likely not grow further than that without running into the actual wall: labor. That's where things get dicey. You have to pay people, and ideally yourself, for the labor you invest into the project. As Tildes is a non profit it's already clear that the developer is building it out of love and not a desire to sustain his or her lifestyle. If the developer wanted a developer salary or enough income to hire another developer, though, I agree that donations wouldn't be adequate enough. That's when you turn to selling features (i.e. Reddit coins) or selling ads.