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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

This is one of the saddest posts I've read in a long time.

I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment.

So, I'm sad it isn't viable.

But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess the people behind most of the comments, I would assume no one has ever run a business with payroll, or built something with this much reach. The comments ring really hollow for the most part and seem really callous given this person has sunk his life into making the world, and my life, a better place. I'm scared for the moment he is in life and sad there are not more positive comments, and even better, comments from people where they would actually help by making a donation.

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Thank you for being so kind and supportive. I really appreciate your comment.

I'm ok. I'm hopeful for the future. I believe there's lots of amazing stuff we can do and that Exercism has a great future. But right now it's in a hard, low place. The last few months have been pretty tough emotionally, but I think getting to this place is one of acceptance. The only direction now is up :)

I've gotten so much from your site. I'm sorry you have put so much in of yourself and haven't been able to make it work financially.

Would you email me (chris@extrastatic.com). I've got a few people I think would help depending on what direction you want to go in.

Done, although I emailed the email in your profile. I'll send it to that one too :)

Can you please just add a paid tier before shutting down? Just a $5/mo something that shows a badge on your account, or whatever. Call it something other than "donate", "premium account" or something, and see how many people pick it up. You "only" need 1500 people to do that to cover the costs, which is less than a thousandth of your user base.

Even if it gives a few useful features to subscribers, that's better than shutting down.

They have a paid tier, called insiders, although you can also "pay" through helping other users on the site: https://exercism.org/insiders

Ah, thanks, I looked for that but didn't find it (the "donate" button reminded me of a one-off). I'd recommend changing the link name to "pricing" and A/B testing the recommended donation amount being $5/mo.

I don't know how much effort they've put into experimenting with pricing, but it'd be worth trying to increase donations, especially for such a well-designed site.

Never knew they had this, signed up immediately :) Exercism is worthy of 120$ a year and worth its weight in gold. It has helped me learn Rust, Swift and Kotlin and I'll be forever greatful!

We're not shutting down :)

But yes, rather than shutting down, I'd probably just put the whole thing behind a paywall to try and keep it alive.

Well yes, I mean "maintenance mode" or whatever it is. You've built a really valuable service, if you want some help with maybe reducing costs, I'd be happy to have a chat at some point, I have experience in running things on budget hardware.

Please do not give up. You are doing something that I think is very important in the educational space.

I’ve had things with more users and 1/1000 would have been amazing. The difference between $0 and $1 is gigantic though, and a hard ask for content in most cases.

Yeah, I guess that's true, but it's something that can be worked on and optimized, and I have a feeling the OP hasn't focused much on actually making enough money to pay employees.

I had no idea you were in financial straits and was just using Exercism yesterday to teach myself a new language. I’ve really appreciated the platform and it’s already helped me learn so much.

I’m donating today and I wish you the best.

Thank you so much for commenting. Always awesome to hear about from the people exercism has helped.

I agree with the parent, I love exercism and although not a daily user I am surprised by this announcement.

I hope you would consider a "hard sell" banner ad for donations in the vein of Wikipedia before giving up on the model. I wonder if there are a lot of potential donors out there who would respond if they understood the stakes.

Yes. Like others here, I did not know there was a paid Insiders tier. Just nudging free users with a “consider becoming an insider” hard sell splash screen upon each login with a 10 second countdown would go a long way towards encouraging users to join Insiders and might be enough to avoid going the ad route. Then you are still offering a free option but I think lots will sign up.

Redesign the donate/payment page for clarity. Enable Apple Pay to reduce friction.

They definitely should consult with monetization gurus. Building useful product does not lead to paid users

I submitted the article to HN after reading it and I have joined the Exercism Insiders - recurring $10/month, a very fair deal. Hope that has helped a bit!

As someone already mentioned please consider adding ways for monetizing, ads + remove ads, paywall, paid exercises, etc. to stay afloat.

Also please get in touch, email in bio, I don‘t have anything concrete in mind but would like to be in touch. In another life I would gladly be teaching coding, who knows maybe it works out.

Thanks so much for your support :)

Can you detail the $7,500 a month server bill please? What hardware are you paying for and in what quantities? Would love to compare to what we're using at Linode to see if maybe there is a better pricing structure out there for you.

You've built something great that 2M enjoy, remember that!

Fwiw moving away from AWS would probably get that bill from 7500 to 750pcm or lower. Cloud is very expensive if you've not made special arrangements or can burn VC money/free credits for your org.

>I would assume no one has ever run a business with payroll, or built something with this much reach.

Somewhere along the line between 2010 - 2012 and definitely post 2013, most of the HN comments are no longer founder focused or business minded. It is unfortunate.

> I would assume no one has ever run a business with payroll

Or maybe they have and therefore know you can’t sustain a “business” without collecting money to pay for your expenses?

I think we passed the 2020s and in 2024, nobody asks "how will we sustain this" nd just hopes that a VC will give them x$ which ... will them just buy... time.

Yes, I have deep respect for the people building such a site for the better good, but asking the "how will we sustain this" from Day 1 is important (not even how to get rich, just how to get break-even).

Indeed. Who knew free wasn't sustainable?!?

When your Internet-site-based business can no longer afford to pay its bills, start charing and lock out everyone who does not pay.

Maybe you can reopen a free tier later, but for now you are in panic mode.

"7,500 users, but a bit of money in the bank because the server bills are somewhat lower"

> I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment.

By any chance do you also donate?

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