I have been meaning to put out another periodic call for donations. The last donation thread from May 2019 came alive recently so I think I should do another one officially now
Here is the approximate monthly cost for the 18 months from May 1 2019 to November 1 2020:
The Linode price is a constant $50 whereas the AWS varies on usage. It is $100+ in the summer and half that in the dead of winter. Mailgun was around $2/month, but now it is around $12/month - they changed their pricing plan. $6 is the average of the last 18 months but it will be around $12 in the next round. Mailgun sends all the notifications you get in email. It used to be pretty cheap but it is getting harder to reliably send email so it is costing more.
Anyway for the last 18 months that is a total cost of around $2350. We were around $2000 in the black after the last fund raising round in May 2019 (see Cost report and call for donations). So, currently we are around $350 in the hole.
Please send your donations to my Paypal account: sfs@scottfrasersmith.com. If you use the âfriends and familyâ option there is no surcharge so please use that. The next call for donations will be when the money from this call runs out.
While Paypal is easier, If you would prefer to send a check or cash that will also work. Here is my address.
Sent you my donation earlier today via PayPal, but it said payment is under review. It seems they want to confirm that this is for a friend and not a service.
I think of Scott as a friend who provides a free web service, one which I periodically wish to help him defray the cost of. PayPalâs lawyers might disagree, of course.
Done- with great pleasure. Without a doubt I get more value from this expenditure/donation than almost anything else I spend money on! THanks Scott, for all you do to keep this great site going!
By the way, here is something to think about though I may be wrong: I suspect you would get a lot more donations and/or larger ones if you did the call for donations in Springtime like you did in 2019. In spring we are all excited about the coming season, using this site a lot more to look things up and ask questions, and are just generally more appreciative of the site and its value to us. RIght now most of us have put our orchards to bed for the winter. On average I suspect most of us arenât doing as much research here, asking less questions, and just generally are less excited about fruit growing than we are in Spring. Of course this is only one opinion/thought and may well not be true, but might be worth thinking about in the future in order to get more support. If it were a site about football, then fall might work, or a snow skiing site would probably get more donations in winter, and so on. Again, I may be wrong but it might be interesting to see if you get less donations this time than last time. Then again I think there are quite a few more members now so it might be impossible to compare. Either way, I was happy to give and hope others will do the same.
