
Ask HN: Examples of profitable little free web tools? - xyby
We all know examples of paid online services that became profitable. For example Balsamiq, Tarsnap and Bingo Card Creator.<p>I love to build small tools that do something useful. But they do not offer enough value to charge for them. Imagine tools like &quot;When will the sun rise today in city X&quot; or &quot;How much taxes are in $X&quot; etc. Some of them are used by tens of thousands of people a month. And I get a lot of &quot;thank you, that&#x27;s cool and useful&quot; emails.<p>So far I&#x27;m not making any money from them. When I slap adsense on them, I only make a few bucks. Like $0.5 per 1000 visitors. Even if I optimized that to $2 per 1000 visitors, it still would be just around $150&#x2F;month for all my websites.<p>But since I love doing these little, interesting projects, I will probably make more of them anyhow. Most of the projects I have in mind are little tools that cater my own curiosity. Nothing people would pay for. Like &quot;find all xkcd comics related to a topic&quot; and stuff like that.<p>Do you guys think there is a way to make a living like this? Are there any examples of profitable websites, created by one guy that have some informative value but not so much that people would pay for it?
======
bensmiley
A few years ago I was getting into iOS audio development and I started
blogging about CoreAudio. My website started getting some traffic so thought
I'd put together a really comprehensive tutorial on how to play MIDI files on
iOS. I started selling it on my site for around $19.99 and started making a
couple of hundred dollars per month. Then one of the founders of
[http://www.binpress.com](http://www.binpress.com) reached out to me and asked
if I'd consider putting my component on their site. I decided to go for it and
with the added exposure it started bringing in around $400 - $500 per month.
Then I decided to spend my spare time making components to save other
developers time on common tasks. I developed a piano plugin and then a chat
component ([http://www.binpress.com/app/chat-messaging-sdk-for-
ios/1644](http://www.binpress.com/app/chat-messaging-sdk-for-ios/1644)). The
chat component did really well so over time I built it up - currently it
brings in about $2k per month in sales and loads of consulting work. Because
of the chat component, I was approached by the Founders of Firebase because
they wanted to shut down an online chat service they had called Envolve. They
asked if I'd be prepared to make an alternative service and take on their
customer base. I took on the project and developed a new chat called Chatcat
([http://chatcat.io](http://chatcat.io)). Currently, I'm making about $4 - 5k
per month in passive revenue from Binpress and the chat. On top of that I can
easily make another $5k in freelance work. I'd definitely recommend this as a
low risk path to generating a really stable passive revenue.

~~~
shanecleveland
Great example of turning something small into bigger opportunities. Nobody is
going to come knocking at your door if you don't first make yourself known,
even in just a small way. And don't confuse unsuccessful with failure. It may
take many unsuccessful tools to stumble onto a success. The learning along the
way can also be a catalyst.

------
patio11
I hate having to be vague here, but suffice it to say there exist a few
developers-oriented web applications which did one small thing well apiece.
One day, a Silicon Valley company tired of paying $500 per lead to AdWords
just sent them bolt-out-of-the-blue offers. Suffice it to say that the numbers
involved were fat yearly salaries for nights-and-weekends style projects.

If you want to catch a bolt out of the blue, getting together a coherent
commercially valuable audience increases your chances. That said: the easiest
and best way to make money is to make something people want and trade it to
them for money. If you're smart enough to build something that 50k web
developers use every month then turning that into six figures is
straightforward.

P.S. "They do not offer enough value to charge for" is a solvable problem,
either by adding value or by using equivalent engineering time to build
solutions to problems that matter to people with money. I mean, it's not like
BCC's for loop and random number generator are a commandingly high bar of
technical prowess to justify the $29.95 price tag.

~~~
xyby

        If you're smart enough to build something that 50k web
        developers use every month then turning that into six
        figures is straightforward.
    

How? I have 50k visitors interested in other topics, but wouldn't know how to
turn that into any money at all.

    
    
        BCC's for loop and random number generator
    

What is BCC?

~~~
patio11
BCC is Bingo Card Creator.

The broad strokes of making money from a tight, commercially relevant
audience: collect their email addresses by promising you'll send them
something valuable, send them something valuable, continue doing so, offer
them the opportunity to purchase something one step more advanced than that
for a meaningful amount of money.

This may or may not be achievable from the position you're in, since "50k
visitors across a portfolio of websites" is possibly quite different in
character from "50k highly paid professionals with congruent interests who
make a habit of coming to your site to solve a problem which implies the
existence of a second problem that has an active market in solutions available
and lots of money sloshing around in customer acquisition budgets among them."

All of the sub phrases there suggest valuable things to shoot for in new
projects, by the way. Given the choice between a website which could be used
by anyone in St. Louis or anyone in a well-paid profession of equivalent size,
pick the second. Given the choice of serving nail artists or lawyers, pick
lawyers. Given the choice of solving a problem which is peripheral to their
interests or one which is more central, pick the central one. Given the choice
of "totally noncommercializable" versus "abuts a very commercial field", pick
the second one. etc

------
ralphholzmann
I created sendtodropbox.com (email attachments to Dropbox) as a side project
about 3 years ago. After the initial prototype, two-ish rewrites, and
monetizing it with a freemium model, it's now got 1100 paying subscribers and
brought in $20k in revenue this year. I did the whole thing myself (aside from
the website template design, which a buddy of mine helped out with). This
doesn't technically fall under the "informative value" category, but going
solo on a project to make it profitable is definitely possible.

~~~
xyby
Interesting. How do you market it?

~~~
ralphholzmann
I don't. All subscribers and traffic are organic from Google searches.

~~~
prezjordan
Thank you for sharing the details! Creating something like this, and possibly
having it pay my rent, is something I'm hoping to build in 2015.

------
ada1981
About 7 years ago I invented and patented CreditCovers : "skins for credit
cards". They are widely regarded in marketing circles as the single most
effective way to start an offline conversation about a brand - called a "new
dawn in viral marketing" by BusinessWeek.

CreditCovers.com is a near fully automated business at this point. I set up a
deal with a factory in Brooklyn to handle print / pack / ship and wrote
software to handle batching orders to them daily and updating customers.

Also, I created a DIY tool for people to customize their own which cut down on
tons of e-mails of people asking for custom covers and having to do graphic
work. [http://creditcovers.com/DIY](http://creditcovers.com/DIY)

It's been cool. Ton's of press, customers include people like Google, Ben
Cohen - founder of Ben & Jerry's, celebs, Obama, etc.

Because CreditCovers are so effective, our single greatest marketing tool is
just to give them away which always results in a positive ROI on referrals..
So that said, anyone who wants one with their start-up logo / dog / gf / mom /
whatever on it can go get one... Use code 'hackernews' to get $10 off an order
and get one free. (You will have to create it yourself using our tool at
creditcovers.com/DIY - there are photoshop templates as well)

Also - we have a generous affiliate program of 50% if you'd like to partner on
either 1 off or bulk sales - hit us up. order@creditcovers.com

~~~
bambax
Interesting! Do you have designs for European cards that have a chip that
needs to be in contact with the reader (the chip is in the upper left corner)?

~~~
ada1981
Yes, you can select the "chipped / smart card" option when customizing them
with the DIY tool.

------
adventured
As someone else mentioned, the only method I've seen work is either a niche
with very high CPM rates, or to garner a lot of traffic.

On the ton of traffic side, there are a lot of examples, but Google has nuked
countless of those over time.

eg: [http://www.markosweb.com/](http://www.markosweb.com/)

They were once one of the top ~1,000 sites in the world, and that site was
generating over a million dollars per year via AdSense. They'd show up for
nearly any search for a random domain / site in google. A lot of sites were
using that domain info technique to spam traffic (they'd show things like
pagerank, alexa rank, estimated value, blah blah).

Well that concept is still functional, just not as lucrative. Today you can
find "sites like X" sites that are plentiful in the serps. There is still a
lot of traffic in it.

Some presently still successful examples (some are spammy, some are less so;
Google has hit some of these hard this year; if you asked most of these sites,
they'd claim they're valuable tools):

[http://www.semrush.com](http://www.semrush.com)

[http://www.network-tools.com](http://www.network-tools.com)

[http://www.ip-adress.com](http://www.ip-adress.com)

[http://www.prchecker.info](http://www.prchecker.info)

[http://www.intodns.com](http://www.intodns.com)

[http://who.is](http://who.is)

[http://www.aboutus.org](http://www.aboutus.org)

[http://www.similarsites.com](http://www.similarsites.com)

~~~
AznHisoka
please dont put semrush in that list. I use it regularly and they probably
make over 5 million in annual revenue, if not more.

~~~
adventured
I've followed them for a long time. They weren't always as... enterprise
upstanding as they are today. And their method of getting attention falls into
the same category as the others - serps spamming. That's why they have 6.4
million pages in Google. It's automatically generated, low quality search
engine spam. That's how they built their business.

Why just look at this high quality content I pulled off of page six of their
Google results:

[http://www.semrush.com/info/pornoorzl.com](http://www.semrush.com/info/pornoorzl.com)

Or

[http://www.semrush.com/info/streamingbet.com](http://www.semrush.com/info/streamingbet.com)

There are millions of more pages like that. It's content spam. Hopefully
Google does the right thing and adjusts their traffic accordingly.

~~~
BorisMelnik
agree, and their data is _wrong_. I have a number of sites that do 1000+ UV's
per day and have compared traffic a number of different times. Not even close,
to say the least.

------
ginkgotree
I just sealed a deal yesterday, making mid-3 figure /month revenue with a
sponsor for a weekend project of mine:
[http://hacker.surf](http://hacker.surf)

HackerSurf launched a few days ago on HN, and sat on the front page for about
12 hours. Here's a recap on how it all went down here:
[http://scotthasbrouck.com/8000-uniques-from-weekend-node-
js-...](http://scotthasbrouck.com/8000-uniques-from-weekend-node-js-project-
to-the-front-page-of-hacker-news/)

A small example of a small project leading to recurring revenue. I'm writing
another blog post for tomorrow on going from launch to solid revenue in 48
hours, I'll followup here with it.

~~~
bbcbasic
I read your blog post - the bit about open sourcing connects with me. It is
the direction I would like to go in. Write open source but still make money.

------
wallflower
The general formula is you have to nurture and build your own community.
Quality over quantity. There are many examples of people aggregating and
filtering content ([http://iosdevweekly.com](http://iosdevweekly.com)) to
producing content (basically all sites from the smallest blog up to BuzzFeed).
The metric if there is one is how engaged your community is. Do they open your
regular cadence newsletter? Do your current readers forward your newsletters?
You can game social media all you want and in the end the real thing is are
you providing value to people in the community you are contributing to/part
of. All those people who sell 2,000 books with a single email spent hundreds
of hours growing their email list one by one. It is easy to write one blog
post that goes viral. And to get them to come back and read what your write
next - that is harder.

Grow your community, give back, deliver something unique that you can provide
on a regular basis.

The reality is you don't own anything if you work for a company. But if you
have 100 or 1000 mailing list opens - that is all yours.

The rhetorical question is do you want to make $12,000 a year or $120k/year.
The catch hear is $120k is salaried and NOT geometrically scalable while the
$12k refers to your own sales/ad revenue. That what you own and have built is
scalable.

It is all about influence and/or providing what people want.

~~~
xyby
How is iosdevweekly monetized?

~~~
chedar
[http://iosdevweekly.com/sponsorship](http://iosdevweekly.com/sponsorship)

------
rk0567
I'm making ~ $100 per month from this little tool [0] I created over weekend.

[0] [http://portchecker.co/](http://portchecker.co/)

~~~
gabemart
Does most of your traffic come from organic searches? I imagine it can be hard
to rank a tool-based site that doesn't have a lot of text content

~~~
rk0567
Yes, most of the visitors come from organic searches. Not necessarily, because
a tool based site will be competing mostly with other tool based sites, with
little or no text content. So other factors may be more important e.g bounce
rate.

------
brucehart
I'm not sure if this site qualifies as "small" enough, but I think Ken Pomeroy
does pretty well with his site kenpom.com. He takes college basketball box
scores, runs a cron job that does some mathematical analysis and puts the
results on his site. He has built the site out in the last few years, but
there are still only a handful of dyanmically generated pages on his site
(rankings, team stats, player stats, game stats). A subscription to his site
costs $20/year and I would guess he has several thousand subscribers (myself
included).

~~~
xyby
Interesting. What do you use the data for? Why is it valuable to you? How do
you estimate the site has thousands of subscribers?

~~~
brucehart
I'm just a college basketball fan that likes statistics and finds it worth
$20/year for his analysis. I have season tickets to a college basketball team
and I like to see information about upcoming opponents and the site's
projections for the game.

I estimate the site has several thousand subscribers because I personally know
quite a few people that subscribe. Many (most?) college basketball coaches
also subscribe to the site[1]. There is also a page in the subscriber section
that shows a breakdown of subscriber's favorite teams by percentage. Based on
how small the percentage changes when you select a team, you can infer a rough
number of subscribers that way too.

[1] NY Times article about coaches using the site (before it required a
subscription):
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/sports/ncaabasketball/24nc...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/sports/ncaabasketball/24ncaa.html?_r=0)

------
facepalm
I'm not an Adsense specialist at all, but I suggest you might give it a little
time. Adsense learns how to improve the value of your ads because it
understands your visitors better over time. My Adsense income has increased
600% over time without me doing anything (still a small site, not enough to
pay the rent, but nice extra). Of course other factors than just Adsense
learning might have influenced it, too (ie more competition on ads or
whatever), but still - my experience has been good.

------
bengali3
FYI If you haven't seen it check out this github list & discussion about web
business models:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8073732](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8073732)

------
bsima
Adam Bard's recent work is a good example:
[http://adambard.com](http://adambard.com)

As is Kevin Lynagh's [http://keminglabs.com](http://keminglabs.com) \- He also
made Denizen (I think) [https://getdenizen.com/](https://getdenizen.com/)

I have no idea if any of these are profitable, but at least you get some
ideas. Searching "site:news.ycombinator.com microbusiness" also brings up some
good examples, for instance:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7367243)

~~~
bsima
Candy Japan is a great example, and the creator regularly posts updates on his
blog/here on HN

~~~
bemmu
It's not really a web tool though. But before that I made a widget which lets
Facebook page fans vote who the biggest fan of a particular FB page is. Kind
of an automatic competition that repeats each week. The winner is then posted
on the FB page it is installed on. It was almost as big as Candy Japan is now.
It's still running too, but I've let it languish since CJ has taken over my
brain.

------
a3n
One way to make money from an activity is to sell products and services to
people doing the activity. Supply companies in Denver probably were more
consistently profitable, and their owners and employees probably lived longer,
than the miners who stopped in on their way into the mountains to dig for
gold, silver and lead.

Use your experience with what you do to create books and other resources for
people who might like to do what you do.

Create a hosting service that is structured to support that community really
well.

Etc.

------
shanecleveland
I'm certainly nowhere near making a living, but I have a few simple tools that
generate adsense income. The sites generate international shipping documents.
It was something I needed myself. Targeting businesses in a small niche helps
with the per-click value and organic search rankings, I believe. So I don't
need a huge number of visitors.

I feel good about actually providing value. And they are useful tools for me
and I make a little money (about $150/month).

I've made a few consumer-oriented tools, including a baby name site, a meat
temperature guide and office football pool site. I have not generated enough
traffic to make ads worthwhile, but I suspect the pay-off would be low anyway.
These sites would require thousands of visitors a day, and it would take a lot
of legwork to generate that sort of traffic.

A few others that I use regularly that I did not make:
[https://identitysafe.norton.com/password-
generator/](https://identitysafe.norton.com/password-generator/)
[http://www.freeformatter.com/csv-to-xml-
converter.html](http://www.freeformatter.com/csv-to-xml-converter.html)
[https://www.xml-sitemaps.com](https://www.xml-sitemaps.com)

~~~
Mandatum
Put your contact information in your profile please.

~~~
shanecleveland
Done.

------
grimtrigger
Since you have traffic, you could work on monetizing in other ways than
adsense. Think of a product that visitors might be interested in and try to
sell them that.

~~~
thecolorblue
I second this idea. Find out who are your 'power users' for each app. Is there
overlap? You can focus on one type of user, find a complementary product that
pays for referrals, and link to it at the bottom of each page.

------
kyriakos
I'm on the same boat regarding adsense you need a lot of traffic or extremely
profitable keywords to make any substantial income. I read recently on a
similar Ask HN that
[https://www.conferencebadge.com/](https://www.conferencebadge.com/) is making
a good income, and it can be considered 'little' I presume but they actually
charge for their product/service.

~~~
jbrooksuk
Off-topic, but I just wanted to let you know that your website looks
beautiful! A very well done to you and a great idea too!

------
tomek_zemla
Some tools lend themselves to starting small and expanding through add-ons,
pro features or alternative versions. The example that comes to my mind is
GreenSock ([http://greensock.com](http://greensock.com)) which started as
small, simple Flash (ActionScript) library, but evolved into a large set of
animation related libraries and plug-ins covering also HTML5 (JavaScript) and
offering various licences starting from free to commercial/paid.

I don't know the internal details, but I have used it on multiple occasions
over the years and the impression I get is that it evolved from a free,
personal side project into more professional product and company. I suspect
that the creator also gets commissioned projects as additional revenue stream.
And judging from its consistent evolution over the years it must bring profits
that justify working on it!

------
kiraken
Why not gather all your products under one roof? Create a website that gathers
all the other tools, choose a theme for it and everything, then start taking
donations or charging small amounts of money for a monthly subscription to all
your products or paid accounts that to use some extra tools

------
ohashi
Depends on what you think of as free/small. My startup,
[http://reviewsignal.com](http://reviewsignal.com) is a free service people
can use to look up web hosting companies. it's automatically tracking all the
tweets about major hosts and publishing the results. It's profitable and free,
but was a lot of works (not sure how small it really is). I've also built a
lot of tools closer to what you're describing, things like
[http://listmanipulator.com](http://listmanipulator.com) and
[http://domainling.com](http://domainling.com) but none of the smaller
projects come anywhere close to being a sustainable living.

------
davidw
Incidentally, for those interested in this sort of thing,
[http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/](http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/) has a
laser-focus on bootstrapped startups that makes for a very pleasant site.

------
davidw
I have a history of sites like that too. None of them ever made any money. I
finally bit the bullet and started working on _one_ site that does something
that I charge money for:
[http://www.liberwriter.com](http://www.liberwriter.com)

It's not perfect in a lot of ways - no recurring revenue - but it's done _way_
better than any of those fun projects ever have, in terms of making money.
I've also learned a lot more because I have real customers that get angry if
things go wrong, or are very happy when things go right because I'm solving
something that's a real problem for them.

~~~
Procrastes
That's a great idea and implementation. Well done!

------
dejv
I do run small website called Notation Training
[http://notationtraining.com](http://notationtraining.com) it is up and
running for about three years and is doing quite good. I do run AdSense there,
making around 200 USD/month and then I am selling premium version for $4 which
quite some people buys as well. I guess I could be more aggressive with
selling the premium version, but I am quite ok with it. There is very little
maintenance going to this product and it makes quite nice extra money for me.

~~~
heywire
Interesting, my workplace McAfee Web Gateway prevents me from accessing your
site, the reason given is that it is a "Parked Domain". I rarely see our
gateway block anything, and I've never seen one blocked for being a parked
domain. Just wanted to pass this along, maybe you're missing out on some
traffic...

~~~
dejv
Thanks, will check it out.

------
davemel37
If the tools are useful enough to attract backlinks, you might want to find a
company that's audience would find value in your tools, and sell it to them as
an seo strategy. Here's the simple formula...

1\. Content Development: Build a linkable asset (content or tools that people
are compelled to share). 2\. Outreach: Develop a targeting list of people who
would likely link to your tool, and nurture a relationship with them. 3\. Get
Rich.

Packaged right, to the right company, you can probably charge $5k-$20k for the
tool and another $5k/Month for outreach.

~~~
davemel37
I don't recommend trying this, but this guy made a fortune using his SEO value
for ranking of years for car insurance search terms.

[http://www.calculateme.com/](http://www.calculateme.com/)

Basically, he published a bunch of calculators, got lots of links, built up
pagerank (not a relevant metric anymore), and than built out unique content
pages/ local directory for car insurance, and sold leads for a commission.

Strategies like this where the content and links are not relevant to the
category (i.e. calculators to car insurance) probably don't work anymore...

But, if you can find an industry that is relevant to your tools, it should
work really nicely, especially if you deploy it on their website under a
resources section.

------
3zzy
A little CSS formatter tool I developed -
[http://procssor.com](http://procssor.com) (now part of MaxCDN). The Mac app
was profitable before I sold it 2yrs ago.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
Perhaps instead of assuming that they don't offer enough value to charge, you
could spend some time figuring out who would value them enough to pay for
them.

e.g., when will the sun rise in city x -> send me an email 5 minutes before
the sun rises in city x (because I told my girlfriend who's working overseas
that I'd call her when the sun came up).

There is probably value in what you're doing. The trick is to find out who
values it, for how much, and how can they pay you a possibly tiny amount with
low payment overhead.

~~~
baldeagle
This is just begging to be an IFTTT recipe.

------
gesman
I wrote this Wordpress Bitcoin plugin for fun:

[https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for-
woocommer...](https://wordpress.org/plugins/bitcoin-payments-for-woocommerce/)

Eventually got about ~15 BTC worth of donations. Free version is fully
functional, paid version allows very detailed performance configurations for
serious stores.

Making about $300+ sales per month on it, fully passively (in $$$ and BTC as
well)

------
HeyLaughingBoy
Along these lines, I have a small app I want to improve and monetize. Problem
is that the value is pretty low and it's doubtful that it would ever rise
above $5/use (and that's really pushing it!) and it would be very occasional
use. Is PayPal the best I can hope for with low sales volumes and low sales
amounts?

Are there recommended forms of micropayments/low overhead payments available
at the moment?

~~~
jetti
Depending on where you're located and where your audience is located, you
could use Dwolla[1]. They have no fees for under $10, which would mean more
money in your pocket and claim only a 25 cent transaction fee for any other
transaction.

[1][https://www.dwolla.com/](https://www.dwolla.com/)

------
jonweber
I built a pretty thorough tax calculator tool at [http://www.tax-
rates.org/income-tax-calculator](http://www.tax-rates.org/income-tax-
calculator). Building it was a great experience, and I monetize it with ads
and affiliate links during the tax season. It was certainly worth the time put
in, and I am currently exploring options for expanding it into a paid app.

------
minhajuddin
I have built a few free products too. I use them to advertise my sisterly paid
products. A few of my free products:
[https://getsimpleform.com/](https://getsimpleform.com/),
[http://redirectapp.com/](http://redirectapp.com/)

You could try accepting donations or use it to build your portfolio for
consultancy projects.

------
edoceo
I just started a document conversion API. Its only making $20/mo now but I
think I can build to $2k/mo after a little more refinement and some
advertising steps. But this is not make a living money. Combined with some
freelancing gigs and other SaaS things it becomes living money.

The biggest upside is the stable revenue which allow you to be even more
creative.

~~~
zrail
I'm interested to see what you've done. I couldn't make this kind of thing
profitable but I'm glad that someone has.

~~~
edoceo
Email me: edoceo@gmail.com I'd love to show off

------
sideproject
We are building "Create your own HackerNews"

[http://www.postatic.com](http://www.postatic.com)

We are not charging yet, but planning to quite soon. Plenty of users so far
with interest in paying. Not entirely sure how we'll go, but we're pretty sure
it'll bring in some profit (or fingers crossed!)

~~~
peanutB
Interesting, how are you making profits btw?

~~~
jpd750
They aren't based on his original comment.

------
ryanrodemoyer
Without any experience doing what you're doing, I would say listen to what
your users tell you. Review their emails and they'll tell you all you need to
know about what they are looking for (enhancements maybe)? Learn to build a
premium model after what they are asking for.

------
someotheridiot
[http://rebrickable.com](http://rebrickable.com) \- a tool to show you what
LEGO sets you can build with the parts you have. It has a large collection of
fan made creations, all with building instructions.

------
davyjones
I have made about 100 USD from pgxplorer. The site is in a bit of a limbo
after my server crashed and I got a bit busy with dayjob. But looking to
inject a couple of booster shots and also working on pg as a service platform
as we speak.

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mite-mitreski
Balsamiq, Tarsnap are not in the same category as Bingo Card Creator.

~~~
eps
Indeed.

At the very least, their authors don't venture into a business development
consulting advising on how to sell to the enterprises based on their vast
experience selling a piece of trivial software to the schoolteachers.

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davidfm
Could you offer api's to your tools or offer them as widgets for other
websites to use and charge for that?

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davemel37
Ask for donations and see what happens? You might be shocked by the money that
comes in.

~~~
eps
Got any numbers to back this up?

Donation model being a sustainable source of revenue is an urban legend. Just
look at Cobian Backup - really popular, of a decent quality, massive install
base, donation-based model - the author ultimately gave up (after several
years!) and put it up on sale, because donations just didn't work at all.

~~~
davemel37
I really don't see any risk in trying it. what are you saving yourself from by
dismissing it based on anecdotal evidence? A couple minutes of work?

~~~
eps
Nothing against "trying it", but your comment implied that you've seen cases
where shocking money started pouring in. I take that you are actually not
aware of such cases. On the other hand Cobian is just one high-profile account
of donationware not working. The whole model is just wishful thinking.

~~~
davemel37
I'm basing it on the Stanford story about using $5 and 2 hours, where a group
that was filling up bike tires for a buck switched to asking for donations and
started making more money...

Alot of it has to do with how and who you ask.

If this guys is getting emails from people thanking him for making it, I am
sure a well crafted message saying, "we can only continue creating these great
tools with your generous support."

Here is a blog post I wrote about that stanford story.
[http://www.davidmelamed.com/2013/01/15/theres-no-excuse-
for-...](http://www.davidmelamed.com/2013/01/15/theres-no-excuse-for-being-
broke-3-simple-strategies-to-cash-in-quickly/)

~~~
bbcbasic
It is more likely to work with face to face contact.

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alexsh
Did you try bitcoin donations instead of ads?

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2511
Google easily answers a lot of these questions. for ex: When will the sun rise
today in city X. it works even for a small village in India

