Ask HN: Do you know of any web dev agency that is a non-profit? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you know of any web dev agency that is a non-profit?

5 pointsshafyy5 comments

If so, can you share your experience (working with them as an employee, owner, client etc.)?

I own a commercial softwarecompany and we build software for non-profit. We create software for education (schools) and give the full rights on the code back to the schools. This give them a way to get rid of expensive license models (EUR 15 per student for poorly build software is no expception). We build internal tools for students and teachers. Sometimes integrated in Microsoft Teams and Azure. We use PHP (Laravel Livewire) and Python (FastAPI, Django).

This organisation is not going to make me rich. We are interested in becoming a non-profit organisation ourselves in the future.

My learnings so far:

- The elephants of the industry are perfectly organised to win the public tenders

- The product they deliver checks all the boxes, but is poorly exectuted. Leaving schools with expensive, restricted contracts for 5 years

- They earn money by asking an amount per student per year. A simple synchronisation tool (to sync agendas between 2 sytems) costs them EUR 2 per student per year. (We built that in 2 weeks and give it away for free these days)

- We work for 65 schools. At least 12 of them bought software for 100-150k per year that they do not use (bugs, bad UI).

- We are cheap compared to the market, but we charge fair. Our profit is very low (10% or less) but we cover all costs and pay 3 fulltime developers. We have work for years.

Hey I've been interested in starting a similar kind of agency. I've worked and talked with many non-profits who've been screwed over by tech and marketing agencies (especially in the mobile space).

When you got started did you just start approaching schools directly and asking what they needed built?

My girlfriend works as a teacher at a school that is part of a school affiliation. During the COVID-19 pandemic, students had to work from home, which put pressure on the IT infrastructure. To assist, I offered advice and developed a small web app to help teachers organize their homework and lessons. I did it for free but the app spread like fire around others schools. Some needed support, some needed new features. That's how I got started. After a few weeks I started to charge.

Not exactly a web dev agency, but the Apache Software Foundation?

I don’t know why more industries do this, set up a trade association where they build the software tools they need to solve their common problems. I’ve pitched this idea a few times and the usual objection is “what if it helps the competition?”.

It’s certainly possible to gain a competitive edge by selecting a better vendor and negotiate a better licensing fee for some proprietary solution, which you would lose with the Apache model. But it may be fairly marginal. An engineering firm might choose SolidWorks or AutoCAD, and I’m sure one is better than the other, but I suspect that the quality of the engineers play a much bigger part in how much money they make than which CAD package they choose.

Action Network has an interesting model. They are a SaaS nonprofit that serves other nonprofits, for campaigns and emails and fundraising etc.

https://actionnetwork.org/

They primarily serve left leaning causes though. I think there is a conservative equivalent but I can't remember what it's called.

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