And I donât mean for ego â I mean that weâre more likely to do a feature we think lots of people will use versus one we expect few people to use. That said: of course we think about popularity. I think itâs also really nice for users to know that our decisions are always based on whatâs best for the app and its users and never on what would make us more money. There is quite enough of that in the tech world already, and itâs really, really nice for us to work on a thing where we never have to consider revenue (yes, weâre fortunate: I totally get that). There is 100% trust that we never think about revenue when making decisions. Everybody who uses it â and everybody who volunteers to work on it â knows that nobody is making a single dime from it. Right now the app is made purely for love, and our goal is to make the best app we know how to make. Thatâs the one where money could affect our decisions â or even just be perceived as possibly affecting our decisions. The Even Worse Problem with Taking MoneyĪs bad as those first two problems are, problem three is worse. Problem two would be â who gets the money? After we take out $10 a month for expenses, where does the excess go? There are a bunch of people who spend lots of hours every month working on the app â how would we divvy up the money we get? I canât think of a fair way. This would take up time I could have spent working on NetNewsWire itself. Iâd file with the state of Washington, set up a bank account, start keeping track of income and expenses, separate NetNewsWire stuff from my stuff, start paying taxes. If we took money, even a little bit, Iâd want to change all that. (Itâs real, though, in the sense that you can give a group of people a name.) The organization Ranchero Software that hosts the NetNewsWire repo on GitHub does not exist as a legal entity â itâs not even a non-profit. NetNewsWire has no bank account and does no accounting. Not going to do that.) Two Problems with Taking Money (Side note: you can see, though, how paying $100 a month for Twitter API access would blow this up. In other words: NetNewsWire is a really cheap hobby. If you add in periodic domain name renewals, weâd probably end up somewhere around $10 per month. I do pay for the smallest possible Linode instance to run a crash log catcher script this costs $7.73 per month. The service that powers the Reader View is provided, also very generously and for free, by Feedbin. The blog is hosted on Micro.blog, and Manton Reece very generously provides us a free account. The website is hosted on the same account that hosts this blog, and it costs nothing extra. My developer membership with Apple is a thing Iâd have anyway. We use free services like GitHub, and we arenât asked to pay anything to the various syncing services (Feedbin, Feedly, iCloud, etc.) that the app works with. NetNewsWire Expenses Are Almost Nonexistent Sometimes, though, they insist! Which is flattering, and I take it to mean that they really like the app.īut I should explain why we wonât take even a dollar in tip money. The answer is always the same: we donât take money, but hereâs how to support NetNewsWire. From time to time a NetNewsWire user lets me know that theyâd be happy to pay for the app or add to a tip jar.
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