Tildes is a non-profit with no advertising or investors, so none of that pressure is there. There's no danger of donations not being enough to sustain it. The expenses are already far more than covered and it could easily stay running in its current state forever.
I'm currently building a site that I am considering attempting to make possible via donations, much like Tildes. Any advice you can share? How well have donations been working? Any gotchas? Thanks for any insights you can share!
The costs to keep it running are already covered by over 10x with the current donations, and I believe the existing servers could easily handle at least 100x the current traffic level.
In terms of advice, I'd say:
- Don't go into debt (or take any investments) to launch the site.
- Build something lightweight so the costs are low. Use dedicated server(s), avoid cloud hosting like AWS.
- Incorporate as a non-profit if you can.
That's where things get dicey. You have to pay people, and ideally yourself, for the labor you invest into the project. As Tildes is a non profit it's already clear that the developer is building it out of love and not a desire to sustain his or her lifestyle. If the developer wanted a developer salary or enough income to hire another developer, though, I agree that donations wouldn't be adequate enough. That's when you turn to selling features (i.e. Reddit coins) or selling ads.
Then, if users don't like it, they can pay for it. But with the throttling it actually has a direct affect; they can immediately see an improvement, rather than just an abstract 'vote with your wallet', 'oh if everyone thought like that [why pay, SEP] there would be no server' payment.