

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

I run http:&#x2F;&#x2F;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&#x27;t afford to pay for the hosting right now.<p>Some important details: This has been a personal project and isn&#x27;t part of any commercial entity. In each response you&#x27;ll see a reference to getjsonip.com and jsonip Pro. This is an idea I&#x27;ve been looking at for a few months and only have been collecting signups. The server also hosts my personal blog http:&#x2F;&#x2F;geuis.com and a photo streaming site called Popped At (http:&#x2F;&#x2F;popped.at). Neither of those sites are commercial either and are just other sites I develop.<p>If it was just my blog and Popped At, I wouldn&#x27;t be posting this. But since jsonip.com is used by so many people, I don&#x27;t want it to go off air. In fact, I&#x27;m very uncomfortable writing this at all, but I don&#x27;t have any other options at the moment.<p>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&#x27;t really appropriate for that anyway. Lastly, I&#x27;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.<p>Thanks.
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techplex
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.

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geuis
Heroku is pretty expensive. Also, their instance couldn't keep up with jsonip
I think. Good tips though.

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matt_heimer
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).

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geuis
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.

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matt_heimer
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)

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geuis
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.

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matt_heimer
But you aren't checking to if your users are willing to support it and
honestly you have almost no way to reach your users. Your users have no reason
to visit your site, most probably don't even read the about page linked to in
your output. If you do implement donations you need to some way more than just
adding a donation link in the output or to the about page.

I'd suggest trying to drive some traffic to your human readable site once you
have donations setup. The only people that will probably care enough to visit
your website and see a donation button are the people that are about to use
your service for the first time. Unless they are just stumbling across your
URL in some stackoverflow post and then you'll probably never get a chance to
connect with them. Create several tutorial pages on how to call your service.
Create a library for people that don't know JavaScript enough to use XHR. Make
a library with XDomainRequest support so IE 8 & 9 will work with CORS. Make a
jQuery plugin, etc, etc. Don't do it as blog postings, make a real tutorial
section. Every single code example you create should embed the donation URL as
comment.

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geuis
These are actually good, practical examples. Thanks.

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whiskers
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.

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DarkStar851
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?

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gscott
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.

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baconomatic
If anyone is looking for an alternative, you can use
[http://ip.jsonwrench.com/](http://ip.jsonwrench.com/)

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bemmu
Did you get many people looking to sign up for the pro version?

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geuis
It's been a trickle. Under 50 since I setup the landing page.

