price to cost

[chadwhitacre]

Gittip's pricing needs a review. I am committed to pricing to cost, but this is somewhat new territory and we need to figure it out. Our story is that we don't take a 10% cut (like some others). But we need to take some cut because we do have to pay Heroku, DigiCert, IWantMyName, etc. I don't want to take favors from our vendors, because I don't want to be seen as dependent. I want to play with the capitalists on equal footing. It's also really dangerous to run a system like this with no cash reserves. It's a horrible experience for Gittip users if we can't respond to emergencies without running a Kickstarter. Much better to be able to respond smoothly. The two parts of our price that we want to leave out are a) profit, and b) people. I want my salary to come from gifts through Gittip, and I want that to include any notional profit. So where does that leave us?

To date I've been thinking that hosting costs would be covered through markups on moving money. That lightly incentivizes people to keep money in the system, which I sort of want on principle (examine this?), but it means we can't pay our bills unless people are moving money in and out. So Gittip itself has a disincentive. I'm wondering instead if we want to charge users a few cents per week to cover hosting costs and other miscellany, and keep money transfers at cost. Or ... both? Upcharge on moving money in and out, and levy a fee on balances kept in the system.

This complicates our "users receive the full face value" story, but I think we need to do something like it to be sustainable.

We need to be careful to be transparent about these changes in pricing. Really need us some notifications (#73).

[patcoll]

Sounds like there needs to be a "gittip" user on Github so people can tip the project!

Seriously. I think this is the next evolution of Gittip -- being able to tip projects. A git equivalent to Kickstarter.

[issackelly]

I see what patcoll is saying, it would be nice for gittip as a project to have a funding goal versus just taking $(x) from me every week. That being said, what would $0.25 from every giver who gives more than $3 get? Would that cover your costs?

Once you get something that does cover your costs, maybe it can be opt-out? opt-in?

[chadwhitacre]

Ah, good point! Project tips is #27. I had been thinking that tips for projects would go to the people associated with the projects, but I think you're right, projects should be able to set a funding goal for the project itself to cover costs like we're talking about here. Then I suppose tips to projects would fill up that bucket first and then spill over "into" each person's bucket, and then once they're all topped up maybe they're split evenly among them or something?

!m @patcoll, @issackelly.

[singpolyma]

Tipping projects is sort of anti-the-Github-way (since there are no projects on Github, really, in line with the distributed nature of git).

I'm totally +1 on funding gittip through gittip, though, probably by funding the creator.

[chadwhitacre]

Once we get our chargebacks off the Delpan Incident (#329) that will play into this conversation as well. Gittip needs to project fraud and plan to pay for it.

[chadwhitacre]

I guess #1031 is actually a dupe of this. That's landed, so closing this.

[chadwhitacre]

FWIW we never got chargebacks off Delpan because we refunded everyone.

[chadwhitacre]

Actually, we did get chargebacks, but we had already refunded the transactions in question, and @balanced handles the subsequent dispute resolution for us.