Flossbank

Give back to open source - for free

2 followers

Give back to open source - for free

2 followers

Flossbank allows you to support open source for free. Simply sign up, install the CLI, and voilà! Now, whenever you npm install in your terminal, you'll see an ad. The revenue from that ad goes directly towards the open source projects you just installed!

Launch tags:Open Source•Developer Tools•Tech

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Promoted

Songcorder

I like the idea of giving back to the creators, but why ads? I thought we are trying to stay away from the ads as far as possible. No-one enjoys them and they're a terrible waste of resources.

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6yr ago

Flossbank

Maker

@doomhammer Totally! And we actually have a "donate instead" option. However only being able to donate as a means of "giving back" creates a significant financial barrier. By introducing ads we enable "giving back" to happen for free, as soon as someone starts to code, whether in school, a bootcamp, or at a young age. I'd encourage you to try it out, the ads are super non invasive (text only, only during download of packages). I actually have been thinking of the ads as more of a tech newsletter where we compile a lot of great new tools we've stumbled upon, and then some just happen to be promoted or "sponsored"

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6yr ago

Songcorder

@joel_wasserman_ thank you very much for your clarification. It's great to know that you also consider other options besides ads.

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6yr ago

Ductts

I've been demoing Flossbank and have really liked it. It's one of those tools that you can "forget" about easily because you're not always installing things, but then when you do, you can remember that you're supporting open source in the process! Plus, I've discovered a couple cool tools from the ads as well, I admit.

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6yr ago

Flossbank

Maker

@cassidoo Ahhh that's the dream! Thanks for demoing Cassidy!

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6yr ago

Flossbank

Maker

Flossbank was founded recently to remove the financial barrier to giving back to open source. Now anyone can give back, for free, as soon as they start programming. Hopefully this can shift the funding open source paradigm moving forward! Check out how easy it is in the video above and drop us a line at support@flossbank.com with any feedback or general questions about getting involved

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6yr ago

SnoopReport

How are donations distributed?

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6yr ago

Flossbank

Maker

@jesmith Great question James - we distribute donations based on your installs each month. Whenever your donation is processed each month, we create an "install map" of your installs from the month before and their associated weights. Then we break up the donation according to the map, and distribute the donation!

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6yr ago

Ductts

@jesmith @joel_wasserman_ Does it use GitHub Sponsors or something to get the money to the maintainers?

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6yr ago

Flossbank

Maker

@jesmith @cassidoo We're working on the maintainer portal now but it'll use Stripe payouts :)

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6yr ago

Nothing Private

@joel_wasserman_ Please let me know once the maintainer portal is done, is there any way a maintainer can onboard his/her library to this platform now?.

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6yr ago

Flossbank

Maker

@gautamkrishnar Not yet! We need some early adopters so we'll be in touch soon!

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6yr ago

Looks interesting. Do you guys collect any kind of data from the users?

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6yr ago

Flossbank

Maker

@sprajosh no data! we hate ad networks, the only reason we introduced ads was so people without financial means could still give back. All that to say is our CLI is open source so all code can be checked out here: github.com/flossbank/cli - and without digging, we just send up what package manager was used, a timestamp, and the top level packages (so we can distribute the ad revenue!)

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6yr ago

Flossbank

Maker

@sprajosh oh also the CLI version so in case of a bug we can debug it

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6yr ago

@joel_wasserman_ I checked your FAQ and saw your project on Github. Sounds really nice. Started using it yesterday. It works like a charm with 0 distractions and changes in the normal workflow. Hope you guys do well!!

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6yr ago

Really excited to have a new way to give back to open source!

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6yr ago

Flossbank

Maker

@_grahm Thanks Graham. Even if Flossbank doesn't work out, we hope it is a forcing function to continue the conversation around funding open source work

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6yr ago