It's a public, GPL project https://github.com/synergy/synergy You can either compile it yourself or you can go through the very smooth purchase process to get a lifetime subscription to pre-compiled binary installers for $10. It was much cheaper for me to just type in my CC# and move on with enjoying the program than to even investigate compiling it myself.
Both Synergy and Humble Bundle do the same thing: They make going through the checkout line a smooth, easy, natural process on the path to getting the software. The problem with donations is not really that people are so cheap. It's that they're so lazy. If you give them what they want up front and then ask that they come back later to go through some awkward process to give you money for something they already have... Well, what do you expect? It's too late. They've moved on with their day. They can't be bothered. But, if you make it very easy to give you money on the path to giving them the goods. Then their appreciation and generosity doesn't require much effort. That's the key.
Is this the documentation you were referring to? Or, was it something else?
There are tons of open source projects that dwarf synergy both in scope and lack of funding, yet synergy somehow needs thousands of dollars, over and over. In my opinion, they are trying as hard as it can to close down the GPL project so they can make even more money.
https://gimletmedia.com/join-gimlet/
Members support their company at $5 / month, or $60 / year.
The challenge with all of this, is that no one has been really able to make a lot of money with the donation paradigm.
For example, 5by5, a hugely popular podcast site, has roughly $2,500 / month in donations on Patreon:
If you look on https://recurrency.us/discover, you can see how much bloggers there are making. Not much.
So, to put it another way, you've made 200 times more (not just 200%) by advertising than by donation? For example, if you had received $25 in donations, then your ad revenue should be about $5,000.
df-offical has an unfortunately dead comment with some interesting and similar numbers:
> Ad-earnings in December 2014: $700, Affiliate Earnings: $200, Donations: $25.
So that would put them at $700/$25 = 28 times more (36 times more if you include Affiliate Earnings). There's an order of magnitude difference between your earnings:donations ratio and df-offical's ratio, but advertising income is definitely the greater share of the two.
I had a site or side-project (featured on Techcrunch, Lifehacker, etc) but only made $40 in donations in it's entire lifetime. It was a small winamp/itunes/kmplayer plugin so I didn't expect a lot of donations but with nearly 500K installs that is a very very small number.
P.S. I never pestered my users for donation though. Never even optimized the donate button or anything like what I do with my business sites since that I made for fun purposes only on a weekend.
I could put on my patio11 hat and say "Just charge for it"
Hmmm, making a more open Humble Bundle type shop could be a neat idea, and I see that openbundles.com is currently available.
A free open bundle library would make this a lot easier, but if someone writes one, for the love of god, dogfood it! We can't have you starving in the streets while trying to make other altruistic developers money. ;)
One extra benefit is 'please sign up for email updates' which while in almost all cases not mandatory, comes with text like "stay up to date" or "receive insights".
I usually do sign-up, and this keeps the person providing these updates with another potential customer for other stuff, and me with usually useful (as I've self-selected as being interested) and interesting updates.
Win-win.
You could tell them about updates, new projects or terrible bugs
Fortunately, their viewers are hard-core fans and ~0.5% - 1.0% of their subscribers donate to them. Seems little, but it's actually a lot (consider that you have to view 1000 videos to "give" a Youtuber $1 via ads).
As a comparison: A certain Youtuber with 1.8M subscribers makes about as much from ads as another with 300K subscribers from Patreon.
Both donations and sponsorship pale in comparison with development/consulting fees. When a company needs a feature they're happy to pay a proper daily rate.
I don't think I'll ever ask for donations again. Plopping a donation button on a website seems to do nothing but make users assume that other users must be donating.
I've never seen donations go anywhere without active hustling/fundraising which makes the website feel like a desperate church. Look at how much effort Wikipedia goes through to ask for donations. And after all that work you'll always make less than you would with ads.
Meanwhile, sticking Adsense code on a website makes you passive money that's less annoying to your users than a donation campaign.
Post a well positioned note thanking people for supporting the site by white listing you on ad blocker "or" via tips. Reposition your donate button as a tip jar.
Stop using the word donations. Find language that signals that you are providing something of value and they are supporting your ability to continue making it available. So far, tips is the best word I have found. I am still doing research.
The word donations makes people view you as a charity case, not someone offering something of value who somehow needs to get paid for it.
X conversions free per IP per month, upgrade for more
X Mb files are free, upgrade for bigger files
Do you have some stats on visitor loyalty? You probably get a lot of passer-bys, but the 1% that uses you weekly should be paying.
It's not too much work to set up a Stripe or Paypal subscription service and put up a little paywall.
It reminds me of https://www.url2png.com/ which I subscribed to for a while.
[ + ] There was a document holding up an insurance application holding up a $X0,000 consulting engagement. That's not the typical case in business, but businesses broadly speaking do have more money than you can possibly imagine to throw at solving real problems.
1) Build it up enough to have a premium tier with something people would be willing to pay for. This essentially makes you SaaS, however, with all that's involved with running a SaaS business.
2) Lead gen type sponsorships on the backend. Let's say your page is a * to PDF converter (as someone linked below), there are commercial PDF services, software vendors, etc, who would be keen to reach an audience requiring those services. Alternatively (again, depending on the service) there might be companies who have content that would appeal to such users and would pay a monthly fee to have a link to their content included on your finish/thank you page (this is common in the email newsletter signup world, related vendors like to be on those thank you pages as a next destination).
For my own part, depending on the tools in question, I might even be keen on sponsoring some, and I was recently speaking with a director of marketing at an incubator who advised me the companies they represent get a lot of value out of sponsoring tools in this way.
I have also seen many developers try it. Monks take a vow of poverty, because it can be spiritually fulfilling, but I do not believe many people would take a vow of poverty so that they can devote every waking moment to fixing the problems of for-profit companies. (There are individual people I'm thinking of while writing this. I won't mention their situations, for the obvious reasons, but I'm generally a quiet restrained guy and, after a coffee date with one of them, I nearly put my fist through a mirror out of vicarious frustration with injustice.)
There are so, so many better business models than taking donations. Let's move the conversation to those better models. "Charge money for goods and services" provides plenty of room for experimentation and has the desirable property of actually working.