I don’t see anything wrong with asking users for donations. But fees change entirely the dynamics. When you make a donation, you are supporting and or helping out something you believe in. When you pay a fee, you are purchasing a service, and you have expectations. It’s not the same.
I think a more stable flow of donations could (and should) be incentivized, like they do on places as Wikipedia, or all those “buy me a coffee” and similar things. I agree that if you have the money for a plane ticket and a trip and are not paying a hotel you can spare 5 bucks, maybe when you get hosted you can get a polite suggestion to make a donation to keep the project and the good experiences happening? Like a “help maintain the project alive” button or something like that. Some people will do it, some people won’t, some people will give every time, some people will sometimes give, but the easier you make it, and the more you remind people that someone is working to make those good experiences happen, the more inclined people will be to give. And giving is a good thing =)
Yes, I think that’s practically the roadmap: We will have an option to donate. But there will neither be a fee nor a freemium model, exactly for the reasons @Aleja posted.
I actually think asking for monetary donations won’t be that much of a challenge for the foreseeable future. We probably will need to spend much more creative thought around aspects like governance, community building, volunteer engagement. Because the project basically depends on members’ and volunteers’ dedication, time and skills. As these won’t be compensated with money, it has to be rewarding and enriching as such.
Relying on volunteers is nice, and it’s always going to be part of the project, BUT: I don’t think 100% volunteer work is going to work long term. People get busy, code needs updates and fixes (or whatever you call it, not an expert, but I understand it’s not something you just finish, and it’s done forever), some support and safety issues cannot wait too much… And people get busy, get old, change jobs, travel, have kids… If the project takes off and reaches critical mass, it’s going to need some kind of full time team, as small as possible, but I’ve seen other projects go south because at some point volunteers just can’t keep up, and then they take years to update or roll new features, and that causes people to move to other platform. Incentivizing donations could help with this issue.
IDK, I have so much respect for the volunteers of this project because they are doing such an amazing job. But: is it realistic to expect them to keep doing all that forever? They have bills to pay too.
Well, I’m super new here, but I want to share a couple of thoughts.
I totally think people should be able to donate in some way. And I am very sure a lot of people would.
I don’t think asking people to donate at the time they get hosted is a good idea to go about it though. I’d feel obliged, personally, and not happy about it since the platform is said to be absolutely free. I would be even more upset if I were hosting people before that. I mean, I host people for totally free, just for the sake of the beautiful idea, but when I want to surf, the website asks me to pay? I understand it’s not about making it mandatory, but I’d still feel uncomfortable.
Actually, I think just a button/banner, say, in Dashboard, could be good enough. It might let you choose how much you want to pay and if it’s a one-time payment or recurring.
I also remembered a great idea of subscription from Habitica. It’s a gamified productivity app, very much an RPG where you need to build your character and fight with monsters, but instead of in-game you accomplish your real-life tasks to get different items and become more powerful. You can play for free, but you can also subscribe and get some pretty-looking items you won’t get otherwise, but that are purely decorative and don’t affect the gameplay at all.
So what I’m trying to say - maybe for those donations/subscriptions people can get some decorative stuff that doesn’t provide any new functions but is just fun. Say, backgrounds for your profile. Or funny hats for your avatar. Or sticker packs. Or anything else of that kind. Not as the main reason to pay money, but as a thank you for donating. This will also unobtrusively indicate that you are a contributor.
In the future, could be a pop-up like saying statistics…
Hey John Doe, you have surfer in X cities and host X surfers. It would be a great experience…
It would be nice is you could donate something so the platform can be alive forever. The team will appreciate.
And show a bar of the quantity of money is needed to be collected and the goal, to cover one year in advance. The money should be collected in advanced for next year and not the one in course.
Asking for donations is fine. Just don’t make it required and don’t put features behind a paywall, like CS did. Before CS gave everyone the boot, a few years prioi, CS put unlimited messages behind a paywall and wanted people to pay $15 to send more than 10 new messages. Please don’t do shit like that.
I think about the popup message, that says: “you have host 5 persons, surf in 7 cities, participated in 4 events and hangout with 8 couchers… it has been a great experience. Would you like to donate at least 1 dollar? we need this year to make the goal of X amount.”
If all users of coucher will donate 1 dolar per year, now it will be around 3000 USD the users we have now. That money would help fixed developers…
Vacants in the future could rotate to give oportunity to other people to work in future with couchers.org Best regards!