Your willingness to stick to your principles on the payment processor thing totally made my day, three times. The third time was when I was openly cheering at finding a way to avoid the trolls by not having to reveal the company so that they can harass them. It's one of the coolest things that I've ever seen a company do, and as far as I'm concerned really cemented my desire to support you all to the hilt.
I talked that up with a bunch of other people. I wish I knew more people who want blog hosting.
Anyway, if the random gifts feature is the way that works the best, I'm happy to use that (and did once and will do so again). The only reason why I shy away from that as the best way for people like me to donate is that to some (small) extent it's cannibalizing your revenue stream, and ideally I'd really like to find some financial way to help support you getting to self-sustaining revenue instead. I'm not sure that random gifts are really doing that; they seem like, if anything, they're hurting it a little (apart from the fact that you get the money of course).
For me, you splitting off the code stuff as a 501(c)(3) sort of directly works against my goal of helping you become a self-sustaining enterprise, since now you're paying more accounting fees and having to split your money into two chunks that can't move back and forth. Also, it's not clear whether the 501(c)(3) would be able to pay for any of your major expenses: server hosting and salaries, for instance. Although I suppose you could run salaries that way in part, particularly as a way to hire developers directly, and that may be what you're thinking of.
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I talked that up with a bunch of other people. I wish I knew more people who want blog hosting.
Anyway, if the random gifts feature is the way that works the best, I'm happy to use that (and did once and will do so again). The only reason why I shy away from that as the best way for people like me to donate is that to some (small) extent it's cannibalizing your revenue stream, and ideally I'd really like to find some financial way to help support you getting to self-sustaining revenue instead. I'm not sure that random gifts are really doing that; they seem like, if anything, they're hurting it a little (apart from the fact that you get the money of course).
For me, you splitting off the code stuff as a 501(c)(3) sort of directly works against my goal of helping you become a self-sustaining enterprise, since now you're paying more accounting fees and having to split your money into two chunks that can't move back and forth. Also, it's not clear whether the 501(c)(3) would be able to pay for any of your major expenses: server hosting and salaries, for instance. Although I suppose you could run salaries that way in part, particularly as a way to hire developers directly, and that may be what you're thinking of.