Can 'Donate' button help?

3 pointssatyajit2 comments

Was demoing an early version of my app to bunch of friends, and one guy commented, put it online for download, and put a Paypal donate button next to it. A lot of people like him, woouldn't mind donating for downloading. That got me thinking ... Can the Donation model be used to bootstrap a project? Have any of you done so?

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It works, but you have to have an enormous number of users or a very good cause.

Even on a site with 30K users per day it brings in less than $50 per month on a site of a couple of friends of mine. It's just enough to pay their hosting so they are happy but as a business model it is a total loss.

Take the most recent wikipedia drive as an example, they have an unbelievable amount of traffic and they raise paltry little bits from their users (big corporate donors are what is keeping wikipedia really afloat).

interesting read about this:

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5079643/wikipedia-volunteers-rej...

yes, if your product will generate revenue for the user. as a web designer if i'll generate revenue by using a free wordpress template i'll donate a percentage for that designer.

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