Ask HN: Best ways to solicit donations for a free service?

I'm no expert on soliciting donations, but could you change to hosting your sites with free services. jsonip.com seems like a good candidate for heroku.

And you could use a static site generator like jekyll or octopress and host your blog with github pages.

As for popped.at, maybe that could be another heroku app.

Heroku is pretty expensive. Also, their instance couldn't keep up with jsonip I think. Good tips though.

Can you reduce your server costs?

At around 0.16K per request * 5,000,000 requests = 800,000K (781.25M) * 30 days = about 23.5G per month. That is well under the 1TB you'd get per month for a $5 VPS at some place like https://www.digitalocean.com.

Thanks Matt. I'm pretty set on Linode though. Great service and reliability. Also, I don't have the free time right now to completely rebuild a server instance and do migrations.

Probably doesn't help but knowing how much you pay is a problem for me, given that it is such a simple service and how much you are paying I feel like it'd be better if I spent the 2 hours to re-implement it and setup my own VPS. 2 hours + 50 dollars == 10 months of service or 50 dollars == 1 month of service. I have a feeling that a lot of the HN crowd would use your service if it was around but we all have hosting solutions we can use to re-implement it so honestly it becomes a choice of giving you money or spending two hours (and it looks like another commenter already implemented a clone). It seems like more like a value-add to another service like Pingdom than something that will ever be self sustaining (this coming from someone that runs a few out of pocket things for people that will never be self sustaining). To be blunt, I doubt you'll break even and if you are having trouble affording keeping the server up you should probably kill it. If want to give something to the community that doesn't cost money you could always release the server impl on github.

But if you still want to give it a go and seeing as you weren't getting much in the way of answers to your question (my answer included) I searched and it seems the same question got asked on HN recently and there were some more useful links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6113484 From everything I've heard I'd try Stripe first (no first hand exp myself)

I've run jsonip.com for years. It supports millions of requests a day. More than anyone else, its organic growth and scale has surprised me. The server I have costs $50. That provides me with enough capability to support jsonip and other sites. There's not a chance in hell I'm going to kill it. That being said, things have been tight for me recently and I'm trying to get this straightened out. But I figured it would be worth the 10 minute effort to see if any of the hundreds-thousands of people that use the service on some very, very high traffic sites were willing to chip in a bit since its been free, and will remain so indefinitely.

But you aren't checking to if your users are willing to support it and honestly you have almost no way to reach your users. Your users have no reason to visit your site, most probably don't even read the about page linked to in your output. If you do implement donations you need to some way more than just adding a donation link in the output or to the about page.

I'd suggest trying to drive some traffic to your human readable site once you have donations setup. The only people that will probably care enough to visit your website and see a donation button are the people that are about to use your service for the first time. Unless they are just stumbling across your URL in some stackoverflow post and then you'll probably never get a chance to connect with them. Create several tutorial pages on how to call your service. Create a library for people that don't know JavaScript enough to use XHR. Make a library with XDomainRequest support so IE 8 & 9 will work with CORS. Make a jQuery plugin, etc, etc. Don't do it as blog postings, make a real tutorial section. Every single code example you create should embed the donation URL as comment.

These are actually good, practical examples. Thanks.

If it bridges the gap until you can get the donation stream idea up and running I'll wing you $50 to keep things running this month.

Don't like the idea of something that so many rely on just dropping off the radar like that! I am not a user of the service myself though.

Yikes, that timed out. Interesting project though! A lot of sites I've helped administer in the past have used ChipIn, but that service has been sunsetted for some time. PayPal is always an option, but sketchy.

What are you using for the caching front-end?

Try offering technical support as a service. People who are scared of "limits" are not usually scared of paying for an enhanced faster level of support... even if it is just your normal support anyway.

If anyone is looking for an alternative, you can use http://ip.jsonwrench.com/

Did you get many people looking to sign up for the pro version?

It's been a trickle. Under 50 since I setup the landing page.