Why nevermonetize?

About six months ago I put together nevermonetize.com, a single page jekyll application with a couple of paragraphs communicating a simple idea – not pursuing an application or website for monetary gains. At first, I truly thought I would be the only one to use it, but then I began to notice people linking to from around the web. This has created its own challenges, as that text I put together in just a few minutes one night now has to stay consistent. Perhaps there is some beauty in something so hasty becoming solidified – it prevents over-engineering the concept. Some things in life just aren’t about money.

What thoughts caused the site to be created?

I often would see so many tools that looked amazing, and were incredibly early on in the development process, or a blog that was just at the start of becoming popular. The experience of using the software stood in sharp juxtaposition to the rest of the web, which was cluttered with ads, pop-ups, and cookie banners. Learning a new tool involves a time commitment. For many sites that started off great, once they started to get traction and had the possibiltiy of making real money, it was too tempting and they began to implement features that didn’t align with the user experience. Often this would be something as simple as small ads, but gradually more patterns would emerge. In the worst case scenario, a workflow that a user would have sunk time into learning (perhaps using the API to link to another application) would suddenly be moved into a premium tier. That causes some headache, and burns some trust.

Nevermonetize was a simple idea to fix that. I didn’t have a problem with people making money off of their work, people need to eat! I also don’t have any expectations of free and open-source software, the developers don’t owe anyone anything. Rather, I saw it more an issue of communication and transparency, there should be a way to communicate the plans for monetization from the get go, most importantly the distinction between monetizing and no monetization at all. Building the website was my attempt at bridging that gap.

What about donations?

This is a tricky one, and one that I hope got captured accurately by the text. I am fully on board for supporting open-source work, and encourage people to donate to projects that they love and enjoy using. Neovim for instance, takes in a large amount of donations, and not a single feature of the application is paywalled. To me, this is perfect, and I enjoy donating to the project. It feels like a great interaction, and is always voluntary. Sometimes this does lead to projects being underfunded, and that makes me sad, but I’ll touch on things like server costs in the next paragraph.

For donations that paywall content or features of the app, then it’s akin to any other payment in my view, and should be noted if that’s the plan. Again, there is nothing wrong with monetizing an application, a pivot halfway through just leaves users in a lurch.

How are applications expected to scale if they can’t take in revenue for the infrastructure?

I’ll start off with static sites or blogs for this one. My thinking was that it’s okay to be small (and when I say small here, we are probably talking in the tens of thousands of readers), and that perhaps if the blog grew beyond that then it would be up to the creator to determine if they wanted to put resources into keeping it up. At the scale in which a blog starts to cost money to host, there would be significant pressure to monetize in some capacity, even beyond recuperating the hosting costs. Thinking about myself, if I knew that I had 10k monthly readers, the thought would always be there. “Would it really be that bad to put in an affiliate link?”. Even if five people clicked, it would probably result in a lot of credits for something like DigitalOcean.

For an application that is running a hosted backend process, server costs are definitely an issue. The developers can’t foot the bill indefinitely to provide complex software to an ever growing userbase. Yet, if there is a hosted backend, I would argue that it is even more important to communicate if you are ever going to monetize the application, and what steps users would have to exfiltrate their data if they couldn’t afford or didn’t want to pay the price. I don’t envision nevermonetize being used very much for applications with a hosted backend, and I completely understand. However, for those that do choose to use it, how cool! A commitment to keep things at a certain scale and just leave it at that.

There are other possible models that come in to play when we think creatively beyond monetization. Take keyoxide, one of my current favourite projects. The server at https://keyoxide.org takes money to run, but the developers explicitly mention that they would love others to spin up their own servers for their community. Matrix is another example, they offer one free instance, but encourage decentralization. Both don’t want to be the only game in town.

How will changes ever be implemented on the site?

This is one of the first questions I asked myself when it hit me that people were starting to use it. Since people read the text that is on the site, agreed with it, and decided to use the link, it would be wrong to change it after the fact. Some sites would be unaware of the changes, and then they would be linking to text that they may no longer agree with. As such, the text that is there now is the text that shall stay!

Without analytics I also have no way of knowing exactly how many people are visiting the site. For all I know, it really could just be the couple of sites I have seen using it around the web, or it could be hundreds! That adds to the fun and excitement for me.

That being said, there have been no requests for changes so far, and it is a pretty simple document that communicates intent more than specifics. The only change I have made to the site is the code forge that hosts the source code from GitHub to Codeberg, which I feel aligns with the spirit of the project.

Does it cost anything to run the site?

Just the cost of the domain (I think about $20 CAD/year). Vercel can handle the hosting for free on the hobby plan.

In short, I have no plans to ever monetize nevermonetize.com or accept donations for it (wouldn’t that be ironic!)

P.S I wrote this on a plane, and I love how great it is to be able to write and test the site without internet.