Monetization via Paid Community Access
June 19, 2022 ยท View on GitHub
AKA: Paid Memberspace, Paid Access, Private Community
Contributions made from private persons to OSS projects in order to get access to the maintainers, contributors, or a larger community related to the OSS. These are often recurring payments for every month of access.
Requires:
- Setup of a payment mechanism (hosted or self-build)
- Setup of a community platform or private content website
- Collection and description of one or more tiers / offerings
Variants & Options:
- Single payments to access community platform or website
- Recurring payments for continuous access to community platform or website
- Tiered Access Levels: Offering access to different rooms or areas (maintainer area, contributor area, version 2 area, ...)
Platforms
- Memberspace (giving access to (parts of) a website)
- Web Monetization API (giving access to (parts of) a website)
- Patreon (in combination with a private Slack, Discourse, etc.)
Evaluation
| Characteristics | Value | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Effort to set-up | Days | Requires community platform or website |
| Effort to maintain | High | Constant reminders to join the (paid) community necessary; Communication effort in addition to development work |
| Cost to set-up | Low | Might require a little money for community platform or website |
| Cost to maintain | Low | Might require a little money for community platform or website hosting |
| One-time Income | Low | Few private sponsors will pay more than a few dollars |
| Recurring Income | Low | Few sponsors will pay recurringly for access to maintainers |
| Income Predictability | Medium | If recurring payments work they will probably continue |
| Full income Threshold | 1000+ | |
| Recipient | C | |
| Additional Work | Medium | Will require time to interact with members |
| Visibility | Medium | Easy to forget, ignore, or overlook, but community might talk about news |
| Necessity to pay | Low | Voluntary; Low countervalue; Might work for curious / social people in the community |
| Entry Threshold | Low | Credit card is sufficient |
| Countervalue | Access | Will cause additional work to communicate with community |
| Scalability | Medium | Scales with the number of users (who want interact with community) |
| Effort for marketing | Medium | Similar to donations but access might get users to talk about the new stuff |
| Competitors | None | |
| Software types | All |