Donation based app? | Hacker News Reader

Donation based app?

11 pointseberfreitas8 comments

Hey guys!

I have this app [really basic] called "tu-dus" [htttp://tu-dus.com] that helps you with your to-do lists and so on. It's really simple right now and totally free, mainly because it doesn't cost me anything to maintain it and I made it for myself [I use it a lot].

I've seen that in Brazil, it's getting a lot of reviews and people are using it, despite the fact that I've never marketed the app.

There are a lot of ideas that I would like to put into practice to expand the app and make it more "professional", so I was thinking about revamping it a little bit, make it international and so on...

I didn't want to charge for it's use but I would love to see some money as a thanks or something. Maybe I'll enable file uploading and this kind of stuff, and that might cost me some money... You know.

Well, the question is... Is it possible to release this app as a "donationware"? Where people pay what they want as thanks or whatever? Would that work? What do you think?

I can see Wikipedia working like that, but Wikepedia is huge. What about a small app? Really unpretentious...

You sound like a lot of engineers I know: you devalue your own time/expertise and are not comfortable with charging for it. I strongly suggest that you move past this hangup.

It isn't "pretentious" to sell things to people who want to buy things from you. It also isn't hard -- if you can set up a Paypal account to take donations you can just as easily set up one to take purchases. I recommend e-junkie, they'll automate the recordkeeping and license key delivery for $5 a month.

You won't make any money that way. I know a guy who does that - he makes $300 a year. By charging for less useful stuff, I make more than $300 a day.

Just add some small feature like adding todo by email and make a pro version and charge $5. The people who love your app will glady support you. When you spend more than 2 weeks on a feature, put it in the 'pro' package. Take a look at how todoist.com is doing it.

I have a site that's a utility for World of Warcraft players (pugchecker.com). It sees about 2,000 uniques a day, give or take, and I've had a donation button at the bottom for a few months now.

In that time, I've received four donations for a grand total of $45. That's a little more than what I see for one affiliate sale using banner ads on the site.

It can't hurt to ask but I wouldn't expect much in the way of financial returns from donations.

Looking at the screencast, it looked very well done and beyond basic. I think you are selling yourself short when you say it's basic and not professional.

However, there are a ton of to-do apps -- many are free. I paid for the one I use because it's an iPhone app (Things). "Remember the Milk" is an example of a to-do app that has web and iPhone integration (and I think charges for both versions).

Off the top of my head, your niche looks to be non-engligh todos (in particular, Portugese). There are a lot of free to-do apps, but maybe yours is popular in Brazil simply because of that edge.

Start charging -- make a free plan that limits the number of to-dos so that people can still try it out and get some value. All current users should probably get the full version for free (for being early adopters) -- or at least of level that is equivalent to what they have now.

The site looks good. The screencast ( http://tu-dus.com/files/screen_pt.swf ) explains things well even though I did not understand the language.

I have no first hand experience in receiving donations (tried, but failed). I have heard from other people that the 0.01% to 1 % of your visitors will donate depending on your audience and your campaign.

If I were you, I would not expect a business to be sustainable based on donations alone.

One of the success stories of this business model is probably cyberduck (http://cyberduck.ch) I have heard from friends that the guy makes decent money with his "donation"-business model. Though it's more like shareware than actually just placing a donation button on your website.

I don't believe in the free or donation based model. You should always charge for your web apps, even if it $0.99/month. You should charge.

clicky: http://tu-dus.com

Reply on news.ycombinator.com