Remember all those cool startups you used that were free but then they were acquired, shut down and now don't exist anymore? It's because free apps don't make money, and therefore can't survive:

Someone builds a cool, free product, it gets popular, and that popularity attracts a buyer. The new owner shuts the product down and the founders issue a glowing press release about how excited they are about synergies going forward. They are never heard from again.

Whether or not this is done in good faith, in practice this kind of 'exit event' is a pump-and-dump scheme. The very popularity that attracts a buyer also makes the project financially unsustainable. The owners cash out, the acquirer gets some good engineers, and the users get screwed.

To avoid this problem, avoid mom-and-pop projects that don't take your money! You might call this the anti-free-software movement.

If every additional user is putting money in the developers' pockets, then you're less likely to see the site disappear overnight. If every new user is costing the developers money, and the site is really taking off, then get ready to read about those synergies.

To illustrate, we have prepared this handy chart:

		FreePaid
Stagnant	losing money	making money
Growing	losing more money	making more money
Exploding	losing lots of money	making lots of money

What if a little site you love doesn't have a business model? Yell at the developers! Explain that you are tired of good projects folding and are willing to pay cash American dollar to prevent that from happening. It doesn't take prohibitive per-user revenue to put a project in the black. It just requires a number greater than zero.

I love free software and could not have built my site without it. But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources. Your time is spent firefighting and your money all goes to the nice people at Linode.

So stop getting caught off guard when your favorite project sells out! “They were getting so popular, why did they have to shut it down?” Because it's hard to resist a big payday when you are rapidly heading into debt. And because it's culturally acceptable to leave your user base high and dry if you get a good offer, citing self-inflicted financial hardship.

Like a service? Make them charge you or show you ads. If they won't do it, clone them and do it yourself. Soon you'll be the only game in town!

— Maciej from Pinboard.

So if you want Nomads.com to survive, please support it and become a paid member.

Nomads.com is NOT a venture capital funded startup. It's bootstrapped! That means we don't have any external funding on purpose. The problem with so many venture-capital funded startups is that their investors force them to grow fast in user base without making any money in the first few years, to then sell out to BigCo (e.g. Google, Facebook) for tens of millions or billions of dollars, then write a blog post about their incredible journey, then either shut the site down, or fuck over their users by selling their user data.

That sucks, right? We don't get that. We don't like that. And we don't want to do that.

So we'd rather go for higher odds of success, try to make money on day one, and not make a billion dollars but just make good money to live off. Maybe we'd actually get acquired later too. But it'd have to be good for the users in the first place. And there shouldn't be the extreme high growth trajectory which will then F over our customers.

The challenge of going this way is that we can't offer everything for free, like Facebook or Google or any other funded startup does. We have to get money somehow because we need to pay for our costs. We could make money in sneaky ways like selling your user data, but that'd suck and honestly it wouldn't make that much money at this scale. So the fastest way is simply asking you, as a user of this site, for money. That means we can pay our server bills, hire developers and improve Nomads.com every day.

If you like what we do, please support this site and become a paid member.