We received such a positive reaction we decided to take it to the next level and setup a full blown organization. I want to give thanks to the Hackathon Hacker Facebook groups that have been an immense help in spreading the word, providing feedback, and encouraging hackers to volunteer for our organization.
> "Our organization makes no money offering it’s services in creation and updating of websites; however, we do ask that organizations cover the minimal expenses that hosting a website may compile. These costs include paying for domains, provisioning SSL certificates, and other small fees that come along with building a website. We charge every organization a one time fee of $150 after we complete your website. No other fees will ever be charged."
So its free but theres $150 fee.
How about saying "$150 handcrafted sites for nonprofits"?
We thought hard about this and in the end decided it's in the best interest of the nonprofits to host and manage their content for them. The $150 fee covers our expenses and alleviates the need for monthly payments.
Also it's worth mentioning that once a nonprofit has paid for something, albeit a very small fee, it makes them far more willing to put effort into giving us feedback.
Think of it as getting a free car but you still need to pay for the gas. Having a slogan of "$150 websites for nonprofits" dilutes the clarity of our mission and makes it look like we are profiting.
> Think of it as getting a free car but you still need to pay for the gas.
The difference is that any service offering a free car would rightfully be seen with skepticism. (and in the case of game shows, you still have to pay tax on the free car!)
You can't say "free" in the marketing. No way around it. One-time low cost is fine, but not free.
I think there's a better way to handle this. We remove the fee and simply ask each organization that gets a site for a donation. They will not be required to pay but we will encourage them to, larger donations could make up for those who don't pay.
Thanks for the feedback, I'm making the changes now.
I can make websites for nonprofits truly for free and host them in free static servers, like GitHub Pages. The only thing I'll ask is for them to make a GitHub account themselves and give me access to the repository. There will be no future or one-time costs.
If someone wanna join me, perhaps we can make an agency like Changeforge that is not doing harm to nonprofits.
I'm really shocked at these types of comments (which I'll note have only appeared from HN) but it's worth addressing.
Nonprofits have limited resources and thus need to be able to update their own website with a tool like Wordpress or another CMS. Static templates are sometimes okay but are not an end-all solution. So far in our first three weeks since launch we have had 25 applicants - half of which require a feature that requires hosting, such as forums.
We're completely made up of students around the world trying to give extremely non-technical people a nice website for their cause. To claim "perhaps we can make an agency like Changeforge that is not doing harm to nonprofits" is blatant trolling, and in my opinion not worthy of HN.
To stomp out ANY concern anyone may have about Changeforge, and at risk of muddling our mission, I have modified our mission statement to be "We're on a mission to give every nonprofit a great website - for $150" which is now front and center on our homepage.
EDIT: I've asked HN support to alter this post's title.
GitHub can work as a CMS for most use cases. At least in most of the cases where the nonprofits wouldn't have the money to waste on expensive hosting services every month, or to deal with CMS systems bugs.
It would have been much better if you made websites static by default and only in the cases in which the nonprofits would really need a hosted solution you would do that. Doesn't make sense to do the expensive/slower solution when you can do it just when needed.
Also, static sites are much easier to convert to CMS-backed sites than is the contrary, which means nonprofits will be trapped forever with the expensive solution you made for them.
What he defines as "expensive" is ~$1-2 a month when all the websites are hosted on the same box.
My understanding of his argument is that CMS software traps the nonprofit while quite the opposite is true. CMS software actually gives a nontechnical user many more options to get work done on their site outside of the programmer community. Anyone can hire a cheap Wordpress guy.
This whole idea that we are trapping anyone or locking them into some expensive solution is laughable. One of our customers who is 70+ years old owns a nonprofit doing 1MM+ revenue/yr. He's been paying $5000 a month for their Wordpress site hosting. That means when he switched to us he saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in the grand scheme. This is an extreme case but many of our users have been overpaying for things they really don't need.
I just don't understand how anyone can criticize what we are doing as harming nonprofits. He's living in a fantasy if he thinks the average nonprofit can even understand what "static site" means.
A $150 one time cost certainly isn't harmful if they know the one time cost going in. What could be harmful is if the post-launch support is lacking. Especially if they consider deploying Wordpress sites which need near constant updating and a pretty strong knowledge about which plugins to avoid at all costs.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 30.5 ms ] threadThis is a follow up to this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11142402
We received such a positive reaction we decided to take it to the next level and setup a full blown organization. I want to give thanks to the Hackathon Hacker Facebook groups that have been an immense help in spreading the word, providing feedback, and encouraging hackers to volunteer for our organization.
I'm excited to hear everyones thoughts!
> "Our organization makes no money offering it’s services in creation and updating of websites; however, we do ask that organizations cover the minimal expenses that hosting a website may compile. These costs include paying for domains, provisioning SSL certificates, and other small fees that come along with building a website. We charge every organization a one time fee of $150 after we complete your website. No other fees will ever be charged."
So its free but theres $150 fee.
How about saying "$150 handcrafted sites for nonprofits"?
Also it's worth mentioning that once a nonprofit has paid for something, albeit a very small fee, it makes them far more willing to put effort into giving us feedback.
Think of it as getting a free car but you still need to pay for the gas. Having a slogan of "$150 websites for nonprofits" dilutes the clarity of our mission and makes it look like we are profiting.
The difference is that any service offering a free car would rightfully be seen with skepticism. (and in the case of game shows, you still have to pay tax on the free car!)
You can't say "free" in the marketing. No way around it. One-time low cost is fine, but not free.
Thanks for the feedback, I'm making the changes now.
If someone wanna join me, perhaps we can make an agency like Changeforge that is not doing harm to nonprofits.
Nonprofits have limited resources and thus need to be able to update their own website with a tool like Wordpress or another CMS. Static templates are sometimes okay but are not an end-all solution. So far in our first three weeks since launch we have had 25 applicants - half of which require a feature that requires hosting, such as forums.
We're completely made up of students around the world trying to give extremely non-technical people a nice website for their cause. To claim "perhaps we can make an agency like Changeforge that is not doing harm to nonprofits" is blatant trolling, and in my opinion not worthy of HN.
To stomp out ANY concern anyone may have about Changeforge, and at risk of muddling our mission, I have modified our mission statement to be "We're on a mission to give every nonprofit a great website - for $150" which is now front and center on our homepage.
EDIT: I've asked HN support to alter this post's title.
It would have been much better if you made websites static by default and only in the cases in which the nonprofits would really need a hosted solution you would do that. Doesn't make sense to do the expensive/slower solution when you can do it just when needed.
Also, static sites are much easier to convert to CMS-backed sites than is the contrary, which means nonprofits will be trapped forever with the expensive solution you made for them.
And "trapped forever" is defined as the inability to copy / paste the output source of the CMS into a static file HTML, correct?
My understanding of his argument is that CMS software traps the nonprofit while quite the opposite is true. CMS software actually gives a nontechnical user many more options to get work done on their site outside of the programmer community. Anyone can hire a cheap Wordpress guy.
This whole idea that we are trapping anyone or locking them into some expensive solution is laughable. One of our customers who is 70+ years old owns a nonprofit doing 1MM+ revenue/yr. He's been paying $5000 a month for their Wordpress site hosting. That means when he switched to us he saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in the grand scheme. This is an extreme case but many of our users have been overpaying for things they really don't need.
I just don't understand how anyone can criticize what we are doing as harming nonprofits. He's living in a fantasy if he thinks the average nonprofit can even understand what "static site" means.