*nod* I was also thinking of things like sponsoring travel to conferences, etc, which is something we'd really love to do more of. Part of the exciting thing about DW is that we've introduced so many newcomers to the world of FLOSS, and particularly newcomers who aren't necessarily the traditional FLOSS participants, and I'd love to be able to move more into easing their way into the wider FLOSS world by sponsoring conference travel and admission for our developers. I remember my first conference and how awesome it was to be around so many of My People; being able to do that for people we've brought into the fold would just be even more awesome.
We're really not all that far off from self-sustaining, honestly. We did our numbers calculating 'sustainable' at a 5% paid account rate taken over active users past a certain level of activity, and before all of this started going down, we'd hit nearly a 15% rate. We hadn't hit the required level of activity, but we were steadily getting there, and things were looking very good. I'm hopeful that when we're able to accept credit card payments again, we'll be able to make up lost ground very quickly.
The advantage to the "sponsor a free user" system (or at least, so our theory goes) is that people will be able to sample the paid user features and get a chance to decide whether or not they like them to continue paying for them once their sponsorship runs out! We don't yet have the stats calculations in place to determine if we're seeing a noticeable renewal rate or not, but I'm pretty sure it's happening at least a little. And to some extent, the people being sponsored already have chosen not to upgrade their accounts, so I'm not positive that it's cannibalizing the revenue stream so much as introducing people to what they can access if they pay. (We need to do better work at explaining what the paid account features are, so people can sample them all! But that's something I have on my to-do list for when I have a second to breathe.)
I like your idea elsethread about implementing a sponsorship for communities. In fact, I like it so much I've added a bug to extend the paid-account-fairy page to also have a button that will pull from a random active free communities dataset. That's a really good idea, and thank you for it. :)
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We're really not all that far off from self-sustaining, honestly. We did our numbers calculating 'sustainable' at a 5% paid account rate taken over active users past a certain level of activity, and before all of this started going down, we'd hit nearly a 15% rate. We hadn't hit the required level of activity, but we were steadily getting there, and things were looking very good. I'm hopeful that when we're able to accept credit card payments again, we'll be able to make up lost ground very quickly.
The advantage to the "sponsor a free user" system (or at least, so our theory goes) is that people will be able to sample the paid user features and get a chance to decide whether or not they like them to continue paying for them once their sponsorship runs out! We don't yet have the stats calculations in place to determine if we're seeing a noticeable renewal rate or not, but I'm pretty sure it's happening at least a little. And to some extent, the people being sponsored already have chosen not to upgrade their accounts, so I'm not positive that it's cannibalizing the revenue stream so much as introducing people to what they can access if they pay. (We need to do better work at explaining what the paid account features are, so people can sample them all! But that's something I have on my to-do list for when I have a second to breathe.)
I like your idea elsethread about implementing a sponsorship for communities. In fact, I like it so much I've added a bug to extend the paid-account-fairy page to also have a button that will pull from a random active free communities dataset. That's a really good idea, and thank you for it. :)