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A comment on Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank. Parent comment

Re:Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank by stavros on Friday September 06, 2024 @02:06PM (#41468394)
Can you please just add a paid tier before shutting down? Just a $5/mo something that shows a badge on your account, or whatever. Call it something other than "donate", "premium account" or something, and see how many people pick it up. You "only" need 1500 people to do that to cover the costs, which is less than a thousandth of your user base.

Even if it gives a few useful features to subscribers, that's better than shutting down.

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Re:Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank by dustincoates on Friday September 06, 2024 @02:10PM (#41468430)
They have a paid tier, called insiders, although you can also "pay" through helping other users on the site: https://exercism.org/insiders
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Re:Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank by stavros on Friday September 06, 2024 @02:25PM (#41468546)
Ah, thanks, I looked for that but didn't find it (the "donate" button reminded me of a one-off). I'd recommend changing the link name to "pricing" and A/B testing the recommended donation amount being $5/mo.

I don't know how much effort they've put into experimenting with pricing, but it'd be worth trying to increase donations, especially for such a well-designed site.

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Re:Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank by joker99 on Friday September 06, 2024 @05:22PM (#41469817)
Never knew they had this, signed up immediately :) Exercism is worthy of 120$ a year and worth its weight in gold. It has helped me learn Rust, Swift and Kotlin and I'll be forever greatful!
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Re:Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank by ihid on Friday September 06, 2024 @03:39PM (#41469092)
We're not shutting down :)

But yes, rather than shutting down, I'd probably just put the whole thing behind a paywall to try and keep it alive.

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Re:Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank by stavros on Friday September 06, 2024 @03:41PM (#41469112)
Well yes, I mean "maintenance mode" or whatever it is. You've built a really valuable service, if you want some help with maybe reducing costs, I'd be happy to have a chat at some point, I have experience in running things on budget hardware.
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Re:Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank by wyclif on Saturday September 07, 2024 @09:12AM (#41473759)
Please do not give up. You are doing something that I think is very important in the educational space.
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Re:Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank by sroussey on Saturday September 07, 2024 @12:33AM (#41471449)
I’ve had things with more users and 1/1000 would have been amazing. The difference between $0 and $1 is gigantic though, and a hard ask for content in most cases.
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Re:Exercise has 2M users but no money in the bank by stavros on Saturday September 07, 2024 @05:28AM (#41472732)
Yeah, I guess that's true, but it's something that can be worked on and optimized, and I have a feeling the OP hasn't focused much on actually making enough money to pay employees.
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