Welcome to the real first step towards a stable, sustainable future for this community.
I’ll be honest, I’d rather just move right to a pitch to subscribe to the site and skip this part. But you have to have a site before you can really get subscribers. To have a site there are costs.
Hosting for PPP that covers the backend production, provides a posting interface that multiple different authors can access and use effectively and can then handle the traffic is going to run about $2,000 USD per year. And it’s paid upfront to make it more affordable.
That price includes the transfer of the archives, and also provides built in payment processing, subscription services and integrations with any other service we need. There’s full support and technical help, basically everything we need to do a rapid redeploy except comments, which I’m still stress testing to find the right fit.
I set the goal on the GoFundMe low because I wanted you all to know that this is the amount just to put the site on the air for a year without any further funding. This is it. We’ll make some decisions based on how much seed money we end up with by the end of March.
Stable sustainability has to come from regular revenue, which is why the subscription model is gaining in popularity with internet publishing. We’re not looking to lock a site behind a paywall, but we haven’t yet got a fully fleshed out program of how we’re going to sell subscriptions.
Frankly, you just have to get stuck in to figure out what works. This is the fund to get us stuck in. Please support us if you can.
(I’d apologize for the creepy puppet, but I’m not really sorry.)