Ask HN: How do I encourage our open-source users to make donations?
https://getpolarized.io/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960
It's basically a offline browser with caching support, annotations, supports PDF and note taking.
I can't live without it which is why I started developing it and will continue to do so.
The user base is really passionate too. We have about 2000 active users so far and they're continuing to use the product. Very little churn.
They're also pretty active submitting issues, recommending product features.
They're also VERY engaged. 40% of our user base says they would be "very disappointed" if they could no longer use Polar.
We've setup an Open Collective to receive donations and have only received $88 so far.
https://opencollective.com/polar-bookshelf
Now I'm absolutely thankful for the donations but this really isn't sustainable.
There are two things I would like to purchase - continuous integration as well as a discourse.org account.
These would be about $200 per month. These would dramatically improve my performance and contribute back to the community.
Here's what I've tried so far to encourage community as well as donations:
- Twitter, discord groups are setup
- Links to these are in the product.
- We have a small 'banner' message at the top of the app that displays messages and one of them is about donations.
- One of the "What's New" message has a banner app asking for donations.
- Asked for donations on our Twitter and Discord groups.
Here's what I'm thinking about doing in the future to help resolve this:
- Make Polar evergreen so it constantly updates in the background and put a "please donate" message every time the app starts. This way I can experiment to see what works.
- Maybe put a 'state' of the donations in the app and that we've only received $88 and what our TARGET is... I don't want to be insanely aggressive with these ads though.
Thoughts?
27 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 79.0 ms ] thread[1]: https://travis-ci.com/plans
[2]: https://circleci.com/pricing/
Edit: Add in links
Additionally, I think we might not scale on the free tier but not sure yet. I tend to use a lot of CI resources. At work I spend about $500 per month on our CI boxes.
> We also offer the Seed plan free (at 1x concurrency) for OS X open source projects.
It's also perfectly acceptable to offer a free version as source only for those folks who want to compile and update it on their own -- then charge for the compiled version with automatic updates.
1. Open Source projects that are used by big companies that can't live without them.
https://opencollective.com/webpack
Webpack is a good example and received $500k per year in donations.
2. Open Source projects that are sponsored by big companies from the start (Kubernettes is an example).
3. OSS projects that are successful and receive contributions from bit companies like Amazon and other companies develop around the ecosystem.
- liberapay
- https://salt.bountysource.com
- patreon
- https://github.com/ddevault/fosspay
They usually allow seeing how much other popular developers make, to get an idea of what can be expected.
EDIT: I just realized opencollective is what you used for recurring donations.
There are two things I would like to purchase - continuous integration as well as a discourse.org account.
These would be about $200 per month. These would dramatically improve my performance and contribute back to the community.
Also, stop using the terminology "donations." You need to frame it as you are providing something of value and you need to be compensated for it. "Donations" are gifts, not compensation for a service you value.
Then add up the hours you spend on the project, multiply by some hourly rate you think is reasonable or would be willing to accept and set your goals at that amount to cover "tech support", plus the amount listed above for the things you need to pay for to enhance the product.
The hope was that the community would at least contribute back enough funds so that I wouldn't have to go out of pocket.
I mean I've literally LOST money open sourcing this even excluding my time to build it.
I'm -$1250 or so at this point.
I'm just trying to tell you that if you want the community to cough up money, the thing you need to communicate is "Hey, I need X amount of money to do this thing to make this product better." That is much more likely to get you money than begging for "donations."
But, honestly, $88/mo at this early stage is quite good. And if you only need another $112/mo to meet your goal, to my mind, that's an easy sell. You just need to spell that out to people "Hey, cool, thanks for all the love. We have $88/mo though we are brand spanking new. But what I would really like is $200/mo so I can add this other thing. Only $112 to go! Woot!"
A "beggar value proposition" does not work so well because we do not see pictures of you starving to death so we are less compelled to help.
It does not mean that no one will ever donate, but if they do so, it is because they are fools or because they want to influence you to prioritize some feature.
If donations do not work, remove them from everywhere asap (they make you and your product look cheap because of the "beggar value proposition").
Since you have low churn (this is the most important thing), try to continue to grow your user base a couple orders of magnitude first (2000 free users is a number too low to plan for any kind of meaningful conversion) and then work it from there to either advertising or freemium.
Yes. Already agree with you on 99% of these issues.
It's just somewhat shocking that the user base is constantly saying that they love the app but not actually showing that they love it...
Add a price and then the relationship changes.
Let me put an example:
It is like you go to a restaurant, you like a lot the food, which costed you $20 each for dinner. The value/price ratio is so outstanding and you recommend it to all your friends. Each time you see them.
Now go to the same cozy restaurant and have the exact same food, same service. But this time it costs $60 each. Your value/price ratio worsens a lot, and although the food is still as good, you do not see it the same way. Perhaps the service should be better at this price. Perhaps the food could be better presented. You start questioning. You do not recommend it to all your friends even when everything is equal except price.
With donations you are asking people to willingly change their value/price ratio just for the sake of it, without any kind of coercion such as impending interruption of service (such as an end of trial).
It does not work. It will never work.
Remove donations from your site asap, grow your users and once grown toa sizeable level think about which monetization model makes most sense for your users (i.e. consumers->advertising, businesses->paid subscriptions).
Is there a way you can build a viral mechanic into your product? Where people using it encourage others to use it? One way to leverage this might be to put functionality that is currently in react embedded in electron into a web app.
One other thing - what about removing some features, or for new features, only putting them in a paid version? So people could try it, then when they like it plunk down $10/mo.
Edit: To add a little inspiration... Let's say you removed a few key features from the open source ( free ) version. Yes, people could go back to previous commits but honestly no one will do that. Then you get rid of all the donate buttons and start selling the product for $10/mo. Let's say you can convert 50% of your 40% most highly engaged users. Even with no growth you'd be making about $4k/mo.
Edit 2: What about charging for cloud sync for the data? You could have a very small amount for free, then after that they pay. You'd have huge margins, and could explain that this is how the project will survive. This is a common business model used by dropbox, gmail, notion, etc.
Have a way for them to pay you money regularly in order to get a visual indicator that they're a big deal and clearly in to your thing more than the regular forum user. Maybe hint at their purchase giving their suggestions more weight in your eyes.
That doesn't solve long term sustainability without long term growth but it's something.
If you are only looking for couple of hundred $ per month then you can probably still find it via benevolent donations. But if you're serious and want to spend more time on the project then move to freemium model. See RescueTime for motivation.
Best is to keep all existing features as free and think of one solid new feature you could build that can be sold as premium. In your case that could be "sync reading progress across devices". If I'm super user of Polar, I would want to access progress on my phone and get some reading done while commuting. Just saying.
Lastly, if you only convert 5% of current users to premium then it's 100 paying users right out of the gate. Not a bad start eh. So stop relying on donations & think of capturing the value you are creating.
I'm sure that your browser is amazing, but when OpenSSL was getting around $2k a year in donations, do you really think that donations is a sustainable business model for you?