How you can support Retrospring
This post is simply an outline of how you can support us. We're not in any trouble, in case the release of this post might make you think so, we just thought it was time to do a quick write-up on the matter.
Spread the word
Use the website, share your answers and tell people about Retrospring (if you like it, of course).
You can also always talk to us on Retrospring itself, on Twitter or on the fediverse!
This doesn't seem like much, but we don't run any ads or push our service onto people, Retrospring's entire growth (now over 20,000 users) solely came from people recommending the site to others!
Coding
If you know how to code and want to help us out, go right ahead!
In case you didn't know, the entirity of the Retrospring codebase is open-source and available on GitHub for anyone to audit, read through and contribute to!
Our active team currently consists of three people which have full-time jobs on the side, so new features coming to Retrospring often depends on our free time, health and motivation.
More people helping out, even with small problems and suggestions can go a long way!
Retrospring is using Ruby on Rails as a framework, with the frontend being written in HAML (think Pug for Ruby), TypeScript and SCSS.
We have a bunch of open issues with different degrees of difficulties marked, so if you feel adventurous you can give one a shot! If any problems arise, we can help you. Once your changes have been submitted, we will review and merge them when we're happy with them.
Monetary Support
Servers cost money, and so do domains and a lot of other things required to host a website such as Retrospring.
Our costs currently average out at about $40 per month. As all team members work full-time, we can easily pay this out of our own pockets, but if our growth continues (or a certain website goes down again, or for good) we might need to scale our services up to handle more users.
Although it's not required at the moment, but if you want to show your appreciation, a small donation would go a long way, or if you want, even a long time patronage!
Patreon:
Used by creators of all sorts, a common platform for something of our scale, you can find our page here.
GitHub Sponsors:
Made available by the platform we host our code on, another option to support us either monthly, or with a one-time donation! Here's the link!
Open Collective:
Another platform for larger projects and collectives to secure funding through continuous backing or one-time donations, find it here!
So, you might ask yourself one...or two questions. “Why are you not just showing ads?” and “Why not add pro tiers to your website?”. We could do that, but we don't like ads and we also do not like putting features behind a paywall. Simple as that.
This also means there are no special benefits to anyone that chooses to support us via any of the methods above. You will have our endless gratitude, but there will be no priority issue/feature queue or other privileges.
Whatever you choose to do to support Retrospring, we are thankful for anyone using the site and enjoying their time on there!
💜