
Ask HN: How do I encourage our open-source users to make donations? - burtonator
I released an app on HN about 45 days ago:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18219960<p>It&#x27;s basically a offline browser with caching support, annotations, supports PDF and note taking.<p>I can&#x27;t live without it which is why I started developing it and will continue to do so.<p>The user base is really passionate too. We have about 2000 active users so far and they&#x27;re continuing to use the product.  Very little churn.<p>They&#x27;re also pretty active submitting issues, recommending product features.<p>They&#x27;re also VERY engaged.  40% of our user base says they would be &quot;very disappointed&quot; if they could no longer use Polar.<p>We&#x27;ve setup an Open Collective to receive donations and have only received $88 so far.<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;opencollective.com&#x2F;polar-bookshelf<p>Now I&#x27;m absolutely thankful for the donations but this really isn&#x27;t sustainable.<p>There are two things I would like to purchase - continuous integration as well as a discourse.org account.<p>These would be about $200 per month.  These would dramatically improve my performance and contribute back to the community.<p>Here&#x27;s what I&#x27;ve tried so far to encourage community as well as donations:<p>- Twitter, discord groups are setup<p>- Links to these are in the product.<p>- We have a small &#x27;banner&#x27; message at the top of the app that displays messages and one of them is about donations.<p>- One of the &quot;What&#x27;s New&quot; message has a banner app asking for donations.<p>- Asked for donations on our Twitter and Discord groups.<p>Here&#x27;s what I&#x27;m thinking about doing in the future to help resolve this:<p>- Make Polar evergreen so it constantly updates in the background and put a &quot;please donate&quot; message every time the app starts.  This way I can experiment to see what works.<p>- Maybe put a &#x27;state&#x27; of the donations in the app and that we&#x27;ve only received $88 and what our TARGET is... I don&#x27;t want to be insanely aggressive with these ads though.<p>Thoughts?
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antaviana
It's just human nature. In general, we humans greatly enjoy outsmarting other
humans and by not paying, your users feel they are outsmarting you.

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.

~~~
burtonator
> 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...

~~~
antaviana
When something is useful (even tangentially useful) and free, people tend to
claim they love it, often with overly excited statements.

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).

------
mimixco
I don't think donations are workable as a way of funding open source projects.
The most successful companies in this space have either a freemium model or
they charge for documentation, customization, and support. Is there something
in your product that users can't live without that you can charge for? The
rest of it could be free minus that one feature.

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.

~~~
burtonator
You might be right... the successful models seem to revolve around:

1\. Open Source projects that are used by big companies that can't live
without them.

[https://opencollective.com/webpack](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.

------
bbody
In regards to needing CI, it appears your project is open sourced. Both Travis
[1] and CircleCI [2] both have free tiers for open source projects, worth a
look!

[1]: [https://travis-ci.com/plans](https://travis-ci.com/plans)

[2]: [https://circleci.com/pricing/](https://circleci.com/pricing/)

Edit: Add in links

~~~
burtonator
Thanks. Yes. I had looked at this and since we're an Electron project we have
specific requirements and one of those is a MacOS host as well as Windows. I
think it's easier to find Windows + Linux for free but not Mac.

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.

~~~
detaro
One of the two linked offers MacOS.

~~~
burtonator
Just re-checked and the MacOS containers cost $39 per month for one...

~~~
detaro
Check more thoroughly:

> _We also offer the Seed plan free (at 1x concurrency) for OS X open source
> projects._

------
rhn_mk1
Did you consider setting up a system where the users would pledge to make
regular donations? I know about:

\- liberapay

\- [https://salt.bountysource.com](https://salt.bountysource.com)

\- patreon

\- [https://github.com/ddevault/fosspay](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.

------
DoreenMichele
I took a quick look and I'm not readily seeing it, so either you aren't doing
it or you are doing it badly, but this here is your value position that you
need to promote:

 _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.

~~~
burtonator
You might be right but it would be far far far too expensive to look at things
this way.

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.

~~~
DoreenMichele
You know, if you are willing to work for free, that's your call. You can
ignore that piece if that is not your cup of tea.

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!"

------
davidjnelson
Have you tried advertising on your website? Something like adsense pays
decent. How many pageviews does your site get per month?

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.

------
amirathi
Very few people donate because they feel benevolent. Most Patreon type
donations come because companies either want to sponsor further development or
need a maintainer for the critical OSS components in their stack or both.

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.

------
Riverheart
Do you have any kind of geographic information on your users? Assuming they
are mostly consumer oriented but are there business applications that can be
leveraged? Make roadmap fundraiser goals? Switch to paying for binary
distribution with option to compile from source? Could also try selling on
Steam in an environment where people are accustomed to buying software, even
if the only added value is having it in their library or auto updates through
Steam.

~~~
Riverheart
Krita, for instance, is on Steam. They actually went a step further and put it
on the Windows Store, which also enables auto updates. Whether their efforts
have been successful I can't say but these are audiences more likely to spend.

That doesn't solve long term sustainability without long term growth but it's
something.

------
ezekg
If you want a sustainable business, you need to charge money for it. Unless
you have a huge user base, donations just won't work. It's as simple as that.
The majority of your users aren't going to be feeling charitable enough to
give you money when they don't have to, but I'm sure a portion of them would
give you money if they had to in order to continue using it.

------
austhrow743
If you have an active online community, can you sell coloured names in your
forum, or little stars next to their name or something?

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.

------
hluska
I just wanted to add in another data point. When Heartbleed was found, OpenSSL
was surviving off of $2,000 in donations a year.

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?

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3KQgt0Cl
Use a pay what you want model. Check elementary.io IMO they are the most
successful using that model.

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j88439h84
Aren't those free for open source?

