4 ms·
Ask HN: Are there any successful tech non-profits?
I'm curious if there are any technology based non-profits that are cater to direct consumers where their primary business is a website/web business. The biggest one I can think of is Wikipedia; they are successful and have a very popular set of websites. Mozilla is another successful non-profit, but its primary business is not a website but a web application (Firefox). I'm not sure if Patreon is a non-profit or community benefit corporation. Do you know any others?
- softwaredoug 4y agoThe Internet Archive http://archive.org http://archive.org Signal - http://signal.org http://signal.org
- samemail88 4y agoI would agree internet archive is one as they have a consumer facing website/business.
- scripta 4y agohttps://free.law/ https://free.law/ Among its other achievements, the Freelaw Project was instrumental in the push for recent bi-partisan legislation, signed by Pres. Biden, in the realm of ethics reform for the judicial branch.
- samemail88 4y agoI’ve never heard of them but they seem like a good non-profit. I was more interested if there were more non-profits that had websites/web service consumers used. Their website more company landing site (but they are non profit).
- lupire 4y ago> Free Law Project is the leading nonprofit using software and data to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive. > RECAP is our tool to put federal court documents in your hands > CourtListener is our archive of legal opinions, filings, judges, and judicial financial records
- mtmail 4y agoIf wikipedia counts, then openstreetmap is similar.
- samemail88 4y agoDoes openstreetmap actually actually have a website I can use as a consumer? I thought they provide map data for others to use?
- trinovantes 4y agohttps://www.openstreetmap.org https://www.openstreetmap.org
- acchow 4y agoThe top result when you google "openstreetmap"
- tiffanyh 4y agoGhost (~$5M annual revenue). https://ghost.org/about/ https://ghost.org/about/
- 20after4 4y agoI'm not sure Mozilla counts as they are a for-profit corp owned by a non-profit. But AFAIK the majority of their activity falls under the for-profit corporation.
- sonofacorner 4y agoNot sure if Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/ https://ourworldindata.org/) qualifies to the type of non-profit you're asking about. But they've built an amazing resource to learn more about the world.
- pirate787 4y agoThis isn't totally consumer but its successful tech https://skytruth.org/ https://skytruth.org/
- dmlittle 4y agoLichess - https://lichess.org/ https://lichess.org/
- sarthakjshetty 4y agoArguably one of the most profitable non-profits of all time: Stanford Research Institute, with a revune of $540 million (2014 figure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International
- MacsHeadroom 4y agoHere's a list of 600+ of the largest tech non-profits https://www.ffwd.org/tech-nonprofits/ https://www.ffwd.org/tech-nonprofits/ Some of my favorites which haven't been mentioned yet: f-droid.org calyxinstitute.org torproject.org
- guywithahat 4y agoPatreon is for-profit as far as I can tell, givesendgo.com is a nonprofit though