Transparency Request: Release Usage Statistics, Expenses and Donations

[CarliJoy]

Dear @scastiel

Thank you for this wonderful app.

I love that you made it open source and offer it for free against donations.

So I really would like to see this app and especially it's hosting being kept alive as long as possible.

In https://spliit.app/blog/we-need-an-open-source-alternative-to-splitwise you wrote that you consider to to add some premium features that might cost something in the future, which is totally fine.

Even or especially for open source developers should be paid and not pay for the hosting of their applications.

I know that people of feel more encouraged to donate if they see what is used for.

So I suggest that you might create a blog entry once in a while (every 3 Month?) that contains informations like:

• How much groups / users there are
• How much the hosting costs
• Roughly how much time you spend
• How much donations you received

You could also add the calculation (Donations - Hosting costs) / time spend to show that you deserve a bit more donations (yes you do).

[scastiel]

Hi @CarliJoy, that is a great idea for a next blog post!

Just to give you an idea in the meantime:

• There are 14,698 groups and 158,962 expenses (the info is displayed on the home page). I should be able to generate a chart to see how this evolves over time
• How much the hosting costs: currently the bill is ~100 USD/month, mostly coming from the database costs (hosted at Vercel). There might be cheaper alternatives though, but I'd like to keep PostgreSQL (otherwise the migration would be quite painful).
• How much time I spend: about 10 hours/month (not as much as I would like), and most of the time is about reviewing, testing, and merging PRs from other contributors.
• Donations: it's not regular, but I can say I receive ~40 USD/month (from 5-10 people), which is already quite amazing!

For now I'm more than okay with the ratio donations vs costs. I'm lucky enough to have a well-paid job, and I'm so happy to see the success of the project :)

[scastiel]

Hi! The blog post is live: Spliit by the Stats: Usage, Costs, Donations

I hope that it will answer your questions.

👇👇👇 If you have any more questions, feel free to ask them here 👇👇👇

[nicovank]

Hey! After some quick pixel math, it seems that your domain is coming out to around 25-30$/year. Cloudflare seems to list .app domains at 14.18$/year which I believe is the no-markup price. Maybe changing registrars is an avenue for some easy savings, although not much compared to other costs. Good luck on the app, thanks for the write-up!