scastiel
commented
2 days ago Hi @CarliJoy, that is a great idea for a next blog post!
Just to give you an idea in the meantime:
- There are 14,698 groups and 158,962 expenses (the info is displayed on the home page). I should be able to generate a chart to see how this evolves over time
- How much the hosting costs: currently the bill is ~100 USD/month, mostly coming from the database costs (hosted at Vercel). There might be cheaper alternatives though, but I'd like to keep PostgreSQL (otherwise the migration would be quite painful).
- How much time I spend: about 10 hours/month (not as much as I would like), and most of the time is about reviewing, testing, and merging PRs from other contributors.
- Donations: it's not regular, but I can say I receive ~40 USD/month (from 5-10 people), which is already quite amazing!
For now I'm more than okay with the ratio donations vs costs. I'm lucky enough to have a well-paid job, and I'm so happy to see the success of the project :)
Dear @scastiel
Thank you for this wonderful app.
I love that you made it open source and offer it for free against donations.
So I really would like to see this app and especially it's hosting being kept alive as long as possible.
In https://spliit.app/blog/we-need-an-open-source-alternative-to-splitwise you wrote that you consider to to add some premium features that might cost something in the future, which is totally fine.
Even or especially for open source developers should be paid and not pay for the hosting of their applications.
I know that people of feel more encouraged to donate if they see what is used for.
So I suggest that you might create a blog entry once in a while (every 3 Month?) that contains informations like:
You could also add the calculation
(Donations - Hosting costs) / timespend to show that you deserve a bit more donations (yes you do).