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>Algora charges a 23% fee over your rewarded bounties That seems, a little high, nearly a quarter. >We also offer discounts to FLOSS projects (non-commercial

>Algora charges a 23% fee over your rewarded bounties That seems, a little high, nearly a quarter. >We also offer discounts to FLOSS projects (non-commercial license, no monetization). That isn't what FLOSS means, FLOSS can still be commercial, usually by offering hosted solutions. I may be misinterpreting what you mean though.

KomoD 4y ago
Yeah, that's incredibly high.
candiddevmike 4y ago
A non commercial license would actually disqualify FLOSS projects
scrollaway 4y ago
It's far too high. The collectives in OpenCollective (https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/) usually charge 5-10%, and they take on a LOT of legal and compliance operations on top of the billing etc. Indeed it's also not what FLOSS means. Still, I wish you the best and hope you succeed, because a proper alternative to bountysource is welcome. But this leaves a bad taste in my mouth from the beginning :/
- irf1 4y ago
  we're sad to hear you feel this way. not sure OpenCollective is an appropriate reference/comparison, but your point is duly noted. in order to ensure we can continue providing value to the open source community, we need to make sure our own project is sustainable. we are a bootstrapped startup without any VC funding and so we cannot cut corners when figuring out a sustainable business model. our current customers, who are all commercial open source companies, are happy with our pricing. and we're happy to accommodate non-commercial projects with discounts.
  - scrollaway 4y ago
    I absolutely would want your service to be sustainable. But a 23 percent cut of the bounties you offer is less “sustainability” territory and more rent-seeking territory. But maybe you don’t see this yet because your activity is low. I say this as someone who tried to build something extremely similar years ago (Fosset, also bootstrapped). I thought I’d get away charging 30 percent, and it was both stupid and greedy. My cut should have been less than 10%, including payment processing fees. I can see that you have very little cash coming in because despite some high profile clients (congrats on cal.com, love em), very few bounties are being paid out. But that’s a now thing, not a long term thing if you do things well. Your service should/would make it dead easy to support bounty setups and payouts. A flow of 1k usd per day would net you today around 6k per month. That flow is basically nothing. A comparison point for you I think is codementor.io — small jobs with coding help (= dev centric community, focused on enabling payments for coding). They have about 20 jobs per day getting completed, at around 50-100 usd per job. That’s a flow of 1500 usd per day for someone who will be a far smaller player than you in the long term. Your advantage is that you have a viral business model: you’re operating in public so the more people use you, the more you’ll get noticed. But you depend on open source projects signing up and that will be your bottleneck. And projects won’t sign up if a quarter of the cash goes to the landlord. If you do manage to get to cash positive with this cut you’re unlikely to ever reduce it; whereas if you start with a reasonable cut, you can still increase it potentially while grandfathering current users for a long period. And you’ll land more projects. My advice: Lower your cut to 7.5 percent and focus all your effort on landing projects that have high intensity bug trackers and don’t move much money today. Make it so users can contribute bounties to issues and that a customisable public cut of the issue’s bounty always goes to the project maintainers (this will make it easier for maintainers to adopt). Make all this dead easy and you’ll move 10k per day in 2-3 years.
    - irf1 4y ago
      we actually don't take a cut off the bounty. rather, our fee is paid by the bounty creator (org) on top of the award. contributors get 100% of the bounty :) thank you for your feedback here and sharing your story!
irf1 4y ago
if companies try bounties, are satisfied and would like to utilize them at a bigger scale, we offer the option to pre-pay fees at a discount for a bounties budget of their choice. there's definitely room for experimentation here. that being said, we do not think the Algora 20% fee (+3% Stripe fee) is unreasonable, especially when we offer discounts upon request & are happy to accommodate non-commercial projects. perhaps "non-commercial" (no monetization / financial backing) is a more appropriate term here?
- ralusek 4y ago
  No it's definitely unreasonable. It should be maximum of 5%, which is still high, but acceptable.
  - kybernetikos 4y ago
    If I think in terms of rewarding open source contributors for the work they do, anything more than 10% (with that including credit card fees) feels extremely unfair, but if you think of it instead as providing effectively contractors for commercial projects that just happen to be open source, then higher percentages might be reasonable. I think it depends a lot on how you feel about what is happening. Fairness is important. I've refused to use platforms because the cut seemed unfair before - it's one of the reasons I've had to stop buying kobo books through the android app- and I'm sure that's a common sentiment.
    - irf1 4y ago
      hey kybernetikos, appreciate your input here! wanted to clarify that contributors get 100% of the bounty our fee is paid by the bounty creator (org) on top of the award

KomoD 4y ago

Yeah, that's incredibly high.

candiddevmike 4y ago

A non commercial license would actually disqualify FLOSS projects

scrollaway 4y ago

It's far too high. The collectives in OpenCollective (https://opencollective.com/ https://opencollective.com/) usually charge 5-10%, and they take on a LOT of legal and compliance operations on top of the billing etc. Indeed it's also not what FLOSS means. Still, I wish you the best and hope you succeed, because a proper alternative to bountysource is welcome. But this leaves a bad taste in my mouth from the beginning :/

irf1 4y ago
we're sad to hear you feel this way. not sure OpenCollective is an appropriate reference/comparison, but your point is duly noted. in order to ensure we can continue providing value to the open source community, we need to make sure our own project is sustainable. we are a bootstrapped startup without any VC funding and so we cannot cut corners when figuring out a sustainable business model. our current customers, who are all commercial open source companies, are happy with our pricing. and we're happy to accommodate non-commercial projects with discounts.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  I absolutely would want your service to be sustainable. But a 23 percent cut of the bounties you offer is less “sustainability” territory and more rent-seeking territory. But maybe you don’t see this yet because your activity is low. I say this as someone who tried to build something extremely similar years ago (Fosset, also bootstrapped). I thought I’d get away charging 30 percent, and it was both stupid and greedy. My cut should have been less than 10%, including payment processing fees. I can see that you have very little cash coming in because despite some high profile clients (congrats on cal.com, love em), very few bounties are being paid out. But that’s a now thing, not a long term thing if you do things well. Your service should/would make it dead easy to support bounty setups and payouts. A flow of 1k usd per day would net you today around 6k per month. That flow is basically nothing. A comparison point for you I think is codementor.io — small jobs with coding help (= dev centric community, focused on enabling payments for coding). They have about 20 jobs per day getting completed, at around 50-100 usd per job. That’s a flow of 1500 usd per day for someone who will be a far smaller player than you in the long term. Your advantage is that you have a viral business model: you’re operating in public so the more people use you, the more you’ll get noticed. But you depend on open source projects signing up and that will be your bottleneck. And projects won’t sign up if a quarter of the cash goes to the landlord. If you do manage to get to cash positive with this cut you’re unlikely to ever reduce it; whereas if you start with a reasonable cut, you can still increase it potentially while grandfathering current users for a long period. And you’ll land more projects. My advice: Lower your cut to 7.5 percent and focus all your effort on landing projects that have high intensity bug trackers and don’t move much money today. Make it so users can contribute bounties to issues and that a customisable public cut of the issue’s bounty always goes to the project maintainers (this will make it easier for maintainers to adopt). Make all this dead easy and you’ll move 10k per day in 2-3 years.
  - irf1 4y ago
    we actually don't take a cut off the bounty. rather, our fee is paid by the bounty creator (org) on top of the award. contributors get 100% of the bounty :) thank you for your feedback here and sharing your story!

irf1 4y ago

if companies try bounties, are satisfied and would like to utilize them at a bigger scale, we offer the option to pre-pay fees at a discount for a bounties budget of their choice. there's definitely room for experimentation here. that being said, we do not think the Algora 20% fee (+3% Stripe fee) is unreasonable, especially when we offer discounts upon request & are happy to accommodate non-commercial projects. perhaps "non-commercial" (no monetization / financial backing) is a more appropriate term here?

ralusek 4y ago
No it's definitely unreasonable. It should be maximum of 5%, which is still high, but acceptable.
- kybernetikos 4y ago
  If I think in terms of rewarding open source contributors for the work they do, anything more than 10% (with that including credit card fees) feels extremely unfair, but if you think of it instead as providing effectively contractors for commercial projects that just happen to be open source, then higher percentages might be reasonable. I think it depends a lot on how you feel about what is happening. Fairness is important. I've refused to use platforms because the cut seemed unfair before - it's one of the reasons I've had to stop buying kobo books through the android app- and I'm sure that's a common sentiment.
  - irf1 4y ago
    hey kybernetikos, appreciate your input here! wanted to clarify that contributors get 100% of the bounty our fee is paid by the bounty creator (org) on top of the award