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Ask HN: Best ways to solicit donations for a free service?

11 points by geuis 13y ago

I run http://jsonip.com. Its a free service, supports millions of daily requests, and something I really enjoy working on and maintaining. Server fees each month are only about $50 USD. I need to find a way of asking for some donations of my users or the service will probably be shut down for a while in a few days. I can't afford to pay for the hosting right now. Some important details: This has been a personal project and isn't part of any commercial entity. In each response you'll see a reference to getjsonip.com and jsonip Pro. This is an idea I've been looking at for a few months and only have been collecting signups. The server also hosts my personal blog http://geuis.com and a photo streaming site called Popped At (http://popped.at). Neither of those sites are commercial either and are just other sites I develop. If it was just my blog and Popped At, I wouldn't be posting this. But since jsonip.com is used by so many people, I don't want it to go off air. In fact, I'm very uncomfortable writing this at all, but I don't have any other options at the moment. Can some more knowledgable folks make some suggestions for how I can go about this process? I have Paypal but have heard stories about how they shut down donator accounts. This is way too small for a Kickstarter campaign and isn't really appropriate for that anyway. Lastly, I'd like to do this in a more or less transparent manner. I feel weird about asking people for donations that goes to run a server that also hosts my non jsonip.com sites. Thanks.

bemmu 13y ago
Did you get many people looking to sign up for the pro version?
- geuis 13y ago
  It's been a trickle. Under 50 since I setup the landing page.
techplex 13y ago
I'm no expert on soliciting donations, but could you change to hosting your sites with free services. jsonip.com seems like a good candidate for heroku. And you could use a static site generator like jekyll or octopress and host your blog with github pages. As for popped.at, maybe that could be another heroku app.
- geuis 13y ago
  Heroku is pretty expensive. Also, their instance couldn't keep up with jsonip I think. Good tips though.
matt_heimer 13y ago
Can you reduce your server costs? At around 0.16K per request * 5,000,000 requests = 800,000K (781.25M) * 30 days = about 23.5G per month. That is well under the 1TB you'd get per month for a $5 VPS at some place like https://www.digitalocean.com https://www.digitalocean.com.
- geuis 13y ago
  Thanks Matt. I'm pretty set on Linode though. Great service and reliability. Also, I don't have the free time right now to completely rebuild a server instance and do migrations.
  - matt_heimer 13y ago
    Probably doesn't help but knowing how much you pay is a problem for me, given that it is such a simple service and how much you are paying I feel like it'd be better if I spent the 2 hours to re-implement it and setup my own VPS. 2 hours + 50 dollars == 10 months of service or 50 dollars == 1 month of service. I have a feeling that a lot of the HN crowd would use your service if it was around but we all have hosting solutions we can use to re-implement it so honestly it becomes a choice of giving you money or spending two hours (and it looks like another commenter already implemented a clone). It seems like more like a value-add to another service like Pingdom than something that will ever be self sustaining (this coming from someone that runs a few out of pocket things for people that will never be self sustaining). To be blunt, I doubt you'll break even and if you are having trouble affording keeping the server up you should probably kill it. If want to give something to the community that doesn't cost money you could always release the server impl on github. But if you still want to give it a go and seeing as you weren't getting much in the way of answers to your question (my answer included) I searched and it seems the same question got asked on HN recently and there were some more useful links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6113484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6113484 From everything I've heard I'd try Stripe first (no first hand exp myself)
    - geuis 13y ago
      I've run jsonip.com for years. It supports millions of requests a day. More than anyone else, its organic growth and scale has surprised me. The server I have costs $50. That provides me with enough capability to support jsonip and other sites. There's not a chance in hell I'm going to kill it. That being said, things have been tight for me recently and I'm trying to get this straightened out. But I figured it would be worth the 10 minute effort to see if any of the hundreds-thousands of people that use the service on some very, very high traffic sites were willing to chip in a bit since its been free, and will remain so indefinitely.
baconomatic 13y ago
If anyone is looking for an alternative, you can use http://ip.jsonwrench.com/ http://ip.jsonwrench.com/
gscott 13y ago
Try offering technical support as a service. People who are scared of "limits" are not usually scared of paying for an enhanced faster level of support... even if it is just your normal support anyway.
DarkStar851 13y ago
Yikes, that timed out. Interesting project though! A lot of sites I've helped administer in the past have used ChipIn, but that service has been sunsetted for some time. PayPal is always an option, but sketchy. What are you using for the caching front-end?
whiskers 13y ago
If it bridges the gap until you can get the donation stream idea up and running I'll wing you $50 to keep things running this month. Don't like the idea of something that so many rely on just dropping off the radar like that! I am not a user of the service myself though.