Community Forge goes Fremium!

Ning recently announced that it would stop providing sites for free. Now Community Forge is bucking the trend by switching back to the Fremium model. Are we crazy? How will we survive - especially in this economic climate?

Why we changed

Firstly I should say that Tim and I have, by our estimates, given a year each to this project, even before we were to start charging for services. That shows, as a two person project, we could keep going as long as our motivation lasted. Having worked out a deal with the French that they would pay €2.40 per person per year, it seemed that we would need 25,000 users before we could pay ourselves at market rates. Meanwhile there was a ill-informed, suspicious but very vocal minority in the localisation movement saying we were trying to compromise them and profit from them.

Then there was the payment system. I was having a really hard time scripting the setup of the plethora of modules which would allows LETS members to pay via paypal or credit card to a merchant account. I could see that the result would be crude, and would require constant improvements and maintenance. If this functionality brought in 1 begrudged Euro per person per year, it might take 3,000 Users to pay for itself at commercial rates. It would isolate those users who have poor relationships with banks, and foster the very values we abhor, that of necessities such as financial services being conditional on money-payments, and the ability of the exchange-mediator to shut people out on such arbitrary grounds.

Furthermore, our big brother, CES charges its users in the local currency and not in bank money. They can do this because that system inhabits its own economy. However Community Forge is outside the economies it supports, so this option is very difficult for us, more so until we get time to implement intertrading.

If Community Forge wasn't going to support pay-per-membership in its hosted schemes, then we could hardly require our hosted schemes to pay membership. All the costs running a computerised mutual credit clearing system are fixed, not only do freeloaders cost nothing, but they are essential to spreading and increasing the usefulness of the network. So we decided that all membership should be paid for on a voluntary basis. We would rather spend our time explaining why our work is valuable than collecting money and excluding people.

How we will survive

So far I've only been talking about the hosted web service. Community Forge is also available for contract work, and is looking for those opportunities to work at proper rates building specific CC systems and general tools for them. This market is very small - in fact we haven't found any buyers at all yet!

After 2 years of working for free my resources are depleted, and it now seems that despite having very valuable skills, I am barred from the cushy jobs because of the gap in my CV! That means those valuable skills are all directed at complementary currencies.

I will continue coding, and writing, supporting communities, and providing useful tools for as long as my compulsion propels me, but without support I will become very inefficient. I'm already in debt, living with my mother and working on a 3 year old machine. Gifts to Community Forge would enable

• me to work more efficiently, with less chance of burning out
• building of realworld networks (not etherial online relationships)
• more features and tools and reliability for the hosted service
• public information work about the potential of mutual credit clearing systems

The more I contemplate the filthy lucre which banks are pumping through our societies, how it affects people, and it is manipulated to undemocratic ends, the less I want it passing through my hands. I want other kinds of wealth, clean wealth based in trust-relationships and real assets. I have abundant powers when it comes to software, but that can only be converted to wealth when this abundance is shared, valued and reciprocated. This needs to happen, but is also a leap of faith.