There are services that are actually free, those who don’t sell your data and still manage to stay afloat. I use a lot of these. I like the Freemium model, I like the fact that the community is paying for my use of a great service till I can stand on my own two feet. So, I was wondering if there were any services you used for free once but once you got money, you started supporting it. It makes more financial sense to go with folks who offer only paid services, because you essentially are not bearing the cost of those who are not yet able to pay (or will never pay), but are there instances where you went with the company who was providing you free service for all those years out of gratitude?
I use ProtonVPN and I trust the folks at ProtonVPN and hopefully someday be buying a paid plan although some say it’s overpriced! What about you. What is the service you plan on paying for one day or one you are paying for now out of gratitude and a sense of community?
Also, it doesn’t have to paid, let’s say you became a tor node because you wanted to help the service you believe in. Or something like this, you get the idea!
Also, thanks to admins and devs of lemmy.ml as I was able to get in without any fuss even after using Tor Browser. And screw reddit for blocking me : )
Edit: It will take me sometime to reply (perhaps a day) but I want to hear you!
We donate to Wikipedia once per year.
We take Wikipedia too much for granted.
It’s a service that has remained ad free to this day. No pop up asking you to be tracked. No pop up forcing you to create an account. No pop up asking you to subscribe to their news feed. It’s one of the few remnants left of the old open web.
@[email protected] & @[email protected]
I never ever donated to Wikipedia, I thought, heck, they are famous enough I am pretty sure they won’t go out of business anytime soon and I was right https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fundraising_statistics. Wikipedia raised about 5M dollars per years from 2016-2021. According to them, it’s to “act as a permanent safekeeping fund to generate income to ensure a base level of support for the Wikimedia projects in perpetuity.” -Wiki
What do you think of that? I mean, I don’t think they need that much to have a financially secure future, do you? I mean, I don’t know how they spend it. Most open source projects don’t have that kind of cash-flow.
They don’t spend it. They invest it and only operate off the interest/returns it generates, not touching the principle. That’s how it can fund the project in perpetuity.
It’s good they’re financially insured in case they face some bad years. Who knows what will happen in the future.
I would be concerned if they barely had any cash reserves at all.