This is one of the saddest posts I've read in a long time.
I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment.
So, I'm sad it isn't viable.
But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess the people behind most of the comments, I would assume no one has ever run a business with payroll, or built something with this much reach. The comments ring really hollow for the most part and seem really callous given this person has sunk his life into making the world, and my life, a better place. I'm scared for the moment he is in life and sad there are not more positive comments, and even better, comments from people where they would actually help by making a donation.
Thank you for being so kind and supportive. I really appreciate your comment.
I'm ok. I'm hopeful for the future. I believe there's lots of amazing stuff we can do and that Exercism has a great future. But right now it's in a hard, low place. The last few months have been pretty tough emotionally, but I think getting to this place is one of acceptance. The only direction now is up :)
Can you please just add a paid tier before shutting down? Just a $5/mo something that shows a badge on your account, or whatever. Call it something other than "donate", "premium account" or something, and see how many people pick it up. You "only" need 1500 people to do that to cover the costs, which is less than a thousandth of your user base.
Even if it gives a few useful features to subscribers, that's better than shutting down.
I had no idea you were in financial straits and was just using Exercism yesterday to teach myself a new language. I’ve really appreciated the platform and it’s already helped me learn so much.
Can you detail the $7,500 a month server bill please? What hardware are you paying for and in what quantities? Would love to compare to what we're using at Linode to see if maybe there is a better pricing structure out there for you.
You've built something great that 2M enjoy, remember that!
Fwiw moving away from AWS would probably get that bill from 7500 to 750pcm or lower. Cloud is very expensive if you've not made special arrangements or can burn VC money/free credits for your org.
I submitted the article to HN after reading it and I have joined the Exercism Insiders - recurring $10/month, a very fair deal. Hope that has helped a bit!
As someone already mentioned please consider adding ways for monetizing, ads + remove ads, paywall, paid exercises, etc. to stay afloat.
Also please get in touch, email in bio, I don‘t have anything concrete in mind but would like to be in touch. In another life I would gladly be teaching coding, who knows maybe it works out.
>I would assume no one has ever run a business with payroll, or built something with this much reach.
Somewhere along the line between 2010 - 2012 and definitely post 2013, most of the HN comments are no longer founder focused or business minded. It is unfortunate.
I think we passed the 2020s and in 2024, nobody asks "how will we sustain this" nd just hopes that a VC will give them x$ which ... will them just buy... time.
Yes, I have deep respect for the people building such a site for the better good, but asking the "how will we sustain this" from Day 1 is important (not even how to get rich, just how to get break-even).
> I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment.
I don't know if iHiD will see this, but this is Lane, the founder of Boot.dev. One of our students shared this article with me, and it really sucks to see. Exercism has always been a go to recommendation of mine for students who need additional practice or to learn languages we don't yet teach.
I know you mentioned you don't wanna do ads, which makes sense. But if you're getting 1200 sign ups a day thats worth a lot, and id be happy to chat and see if there's a sponsor opportunity thats uninvasive and that could at least keep you going.
anyhow, you can reach me on Twitter @wagslane or via email: lane @ boot dev.
Congratulations on a very successful platform! (Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $).
You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves costs money).
It can still be non-profit (which is a great thing), so no one is getting rich off of it, and it doesn't poison the mission. But it could pay the bills.
Update: Processing fees are a problem as posters have pointed out, so you'd probably want to make it $10/year, or $5/six months. It's still an easily decision for a very large number of people.
Patreon has $1/month options, not sure how they do it though.
Would $1/month even be worth it? It seems payment processors would take a big chunk out of that $1, which is why I very rarely see monthly subs of that amount.
You'd probably want to charge $10/year (once) rather than $1/month. It's still an easy choice for many people (of course still inaccessible for students in some countries).
You could use crypto for micro-transactions (it's one of the main problems that crypto was meant to solve). LiteCoin, for example, apparently has quite low fees[0] ($0.03-0.04) Monero much less than that. But enabling this in a frictionless manner for users is probably difficult (I don't own crypto myself).
Fair point. I used 1% at the very low end -- if the amount is small enough (in the $1/month range) I think the opt-in rate would be much higher.
I would then give a free account to anyone who asks. ("We know that even $1/month is a big ask for some folks in certain countries or they may even have a method by which to pay it. If that's you, let us know and apply for a free account here.") Then basically auto-approve (with some bot-screening mechanism) accounts that apply. Sure you'll get some abuse and people lying, but not that many people are going to lie just to save $1/month.
Another alternative is charging $10/month, but allowing students or anyone to request a waiving of fees. They just need to take a minimal speed-bump action to request it, e.g., sending an email once per year. Anyone who isn't willing to do this probably isn't getting much value anyway, and a non-trivial fraction of people (more than 1%) would plausibly pay $10/year just to avoid the speed bump or to support the mission.
that's one percent more success at the mission than you have if you're forced to turn the servers off because you can't pay the bills. Money's to an organization what's oxygen is to a body, before you go and plan any missions you need to be able to sustain yourself.
>(Success should be measured in usage/reach, not $)
measuring success by how much people are willing to shift scarce resources in your direction is a perfectly good way to measure success. It's "weighted usage+reach". the remarkable effectiveness of markets in allocating resources this way is a huge achievement for civilization. I really had to scratch my head at their surprise that a non-profit oxymoron model, i mean, business model wasn't viable.
There will still be plenty of students (mainly from outside of the West) who will immediately lose access if anything gets paywalled by even a cent because of various reasons.
Yes, for sure. You could make it free for users in X countries, based on IP. Yes, people elsewhere could use a VPN to get around it and use it for free but you're charging so little that anyone who can afford or has a mechanism to pay won't go through the trouble.
You do know Twitter never made a profit, right? And Lyft is 14 years old and is not profitable...And GitLab does not make money...And Zillow is not profitable...And Snap is not profitable.
Yeah their minimum is $10, which for me, I can only justify if I daily your project, or use it frequently. I love the site, but I don't use it nearly enough to justify this cost. $5 I might forget about. There's a site I rarely use that I pay $3.99 for, because its <= $5.
I'm guessing fees make it not worthwhile, maybe they should negotiate lowered fees from their payment service, or figure out someone else who would give them drastically lower fee rates.
I was doing some Exercism tasks the other day and then saw this so if only felt right that I make a donation.
Looking at some of the comments there seems to be a number of people who have also just made a donation.
Given the state of every service becoming subscription based, I can definitely see a lot of subscription fatigue.
Maybe an alternative route you could try is the annual wikipedia "We want to keep this free. Please help us buy donating".
I think a lot of people appreciate the service but a lot of the times it's easy to forget that running a service like exercism can get expensive, and would be willing to donate, given a compelling enough reminder of this.
Voluntary donations don't work. At least not for most things. The vast majority of users don't donate, and that includes the most demanding ones.
I offer a ton of free information online. I received raving feedback from people, including some that said I saved them thousands of euros. Just this week readers jokingly suggested giving me a Nobel prize or a statue. Still, donations are one percent of my revenue on a good month. They would not cover my groceries.
This is fine for me, but it's always on the back of my mind when people suggest donations as a funding method.
> Voluntary donations don't work. At least not for most things
In my (limited) experience they mostly don't work because the people/projects that need donations are way too coy about asking for money. Donation buttons get tucked out of sight and/or cloaked in twee language like "buy me a coffee!"
I like to point to https://archiveofourown.org as a counterexample. Hardly the most critical project in the world - it's just fanfiction - and yet they raise a few hundred thousand dollars a year in public donations (solidly surpassing their budget goals) because they run an actual, clear, focused fundraising campaign twice a year.
I'm assuming that you are talking about "All About Berlin"? (I am deliberately not linking, because you didn't, and there is probably a reason for that).
I run a number of apps and services that don't make a dime. In fact, they cost me thousands. I don't mind.
Monetization is a real pain in the ass, and I stay away from it (for these services).
I have the ability to make a lot of money, if I choose, but that's not much fun. I don't really need the money, and I like having full control of everything I do.
I am regularly approached by folks with monetization ideas. Some, are quite good. Others ... not so much ...
Maybe I 'll pursue something, eventually, but I'm in no hurry.
Personally, I think this approach of asking for donations is the right move for a non-profit. Subscription fatigue is real and is becoming a major problem. I am now at the point where I will go without software I would absolutely pay for one time, but because it is a subscription I refuse.
I'm sure when all is said and done, there just are not enough people like me to make a difference, but I sure hope things swing the other way. Subscriptions for everything and tips for everything are two cultural things that need to die in a fire. They are ways of squeezing more out of people, especially by taking advantage of human tendencies. It's gross and at this point I think it is unethical. Maybe not all implementations, but there are plenty that are.
You could use the time value of money formula to convert between one-time prices and subscriptions. just multiply annual price by 30 to get forever price.
So my $6 per month VPS would be about $2,000 upfront.
And a $500 game console would be a $1.50 monthly subscription. (Obviously glossing over tons of differences in say, a PS2 and a Stadia subscription)
It feels easier to ask customers for $1 per month than $360 up front... Especially since I don't know if my service will be up forever
This kind of thinking is why sites like this one, get into financial strain. Why do you expect to get value for free? Would you be the same kind of user who complains about ads, or a highly priced one time fee? I’m glad more products are subscription based since it filters out users who are not serious.
Subscriptions are a pain for sure, but I think a big reason for that is that they are always something like $10-20 a month. For something that people might only use occasionally that's just too much. If they were instead maybe $20 a year and easy to cancel, I think a lot of people would sign up.
In my experience asking for donations generates about 1000x less money (within that exact order of magnitude) than directly asking for money up front until you get access to the product.
Yes, but they're not trying to make 1000x more, they just want enough to maintain their existing staff and servers. They're not looking for unreigned financial growth, it's a nonprofit who wants their service to be free and accessible for everyone.
Very much this. This is the gold standard for non profits. Wikipedia does it, the Internet Archive does it. And the banners are very large and intrusive during donation month. This suggests that they must be having an effect, or they wouldn't be making them quite so large! I think if I was in their shoes, this is probably what I would try. December is generally giving month.
Donation fatigue? The only time I'm prompted for donations online is Wikipedia and internet archive in December. That's about it. I can't think of any other service that asks for donations.
I just had an idea that is a shot in the dark but you could try cold calling large companies with complicated SDKs to see if they will pay you a large monthly fee in exchange for exercism hosting a tutorial they create for their SDK.
You already have the sandbox and the support for the most popular languages.
It may take some development to build out the feature but you probably wouldn't need too many to sign on to cover your costs and you could still leave your core offering free.
This is a great idea, especially when you consider the untold millions that companies like Twilio and Stripe already spend on educating developers. Perhaps along with "language tracks" there could be "API tracks".
I'm just thinking out loud here, but for 2 million users learning to code and improving their skills, there is a chance they want to change jobs or are already looking for one.
Have you thought of adding a hiring feature? Where people upload their CVs, and companies search (anonymously) for talent?
There is a hiring model called PPA (Pay Per Application), or monthly fees to search CVs.
Your unique selling point would be companies are not getting hundreds of custom AI CVs flooding their application; they search for what they want, and you're helping both sides.
This is a tarpit monetisation method unfortunately. (I learnt the hard way) It's common for student ideas too (as in ideas with students/recent graduates as endusers/customers).
The general argument is - we can specifically identify talent and motivated learners/skill-possessing people, who will look for jobs. That's exactly what companies need and companies pay $5k-$10k a head during good markets for this rare STEM skill, like programming!
Problem - The people on these platforms are 70% likely to give up within 6 months or go into another field
Problem - Experience means 10x more than education to employers, especially fundamental experience
Problem - Your information on potential hires as the provider becomes outdated fast and supply-demand changes in hiring market can reduce your commissions by 50-75% in one year (as happened from 2022-2023)
I would go as far as saying these users - because they are typically earlier career - are actually worse for connecting with jobs boards/hiring than literally any random iPhone user for advertising purposes. And companies don't pay much to advertise to random iPhone users. I wish it wasn't so, but it is so according to how companies act.
If OP wants to monetise this way they should consider an affiliate programme to a CV upload or Jobs board site, it will test any appetite for hiring these people at the moment much quicker.
Shouldn't that make it even easier to monetize? I appreciate the resolve to keep things free for those who can't afford to pay, but a lot of your users are presumably actively employed making 6 figures.
You could follow the Sublime Text model and basically have an honor system—if you're actively employed making more than $X, please pay us. If you're not, you're welcome to use it for free!
The Tech Resume Inside Out [0] uses this model (though not on the honor system) for similar reasons.
I think this is a major selling point. If developers could upload their CVs, exercise could package together the users yoe + industry experience with the users learning veracity + main language. I think that would be a solid product that hiring people would pay money for.
Maybe, but as a company a place that appears to be designed to teach beginners how to code isn't where I'd want to look for candidates.
I would look to reduce server costs instead. $7k/month for 2 million users seems like a lot. Do they execute your code on their servers? I couldn't really tell from their website.
That's a particularly difficult vertical to enter. Most large companies (and a lot of small ones) would consider them an "agency" and wouldn't consider any of their candidates. I know that Recurse Center, which is fucking amazing, ran into problems like this when trying to place their participants.
What does "I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model" mean?
Non-profits have costs they pay. Many famously outlive their founders. Many, like co-ops or credit unions, don't depend on donations/endowments. They have revenue greater than expenses as a matter of basic accounting?
It sounds like his model was: "Make a non-profit org to do something useful for society, get funding from orgs that have money and want useful things done"; and it sounds like the problem he had was that orgs that want useful things done are often too specific.
E.g., there are orgs to promote computer literacy among women; and among poor people in India; and among middle-schoolers in Africa, and so on. And he has users who are women, and who ware poor people in India, and who are middle-schoolers in Africa, and so on. But none of the orgs will give him a grant, because they can't guarantee the money will only be spent for their own target groups.
“I think it's fair to say that at this stage I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model working in a way that allows Exercism to reach any of its potential.”
Which provides additional context. Why’d you remove it? It makes it clear that he’s talking about the non-profit business model as applied to his company.
Yeah, that was a big weird red flag for me as well. He is blaming the failure of his dream on "the non-profit model"? Wait till he tries the for-profit model...
Then he goes on to say that he is upset that 96% of people stop the program. Dude, coding is BORING, but coding is hyped so much that people have high expectations so you get delusional people coming and signing up to your website.
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I love exercism. It's beautiful, works in the browser and from CLI. The lessons are really well designed. It's the perfect coding school environment.
So, I'm sad it isn't viable.
But, I think I am really saddened by the comments here, second guessing all the decisions they made. If I were to second guess the people behind most of the comments, I would assume no one has ever run a business with payroll, or built something with this much reach. The comments ring really hollow for the most part and seem really callous given this person has sunk his life into making the world, and my life, a better place. I'm scared for the moment he is in life and sad there are not more positive comments, and even better, comments from people where they would actually help by making a donation.
I'm ok. I'm hopeful for the future. I believe there's lots of amazing stuff we can do and that Exercism has a great future. But right now it's in a hard, low place. The last few months have been pretty tough emotionally, but I think getting to this place is one of acceptance. The only direction now is up :)
Even if it gives a few useful features to subscribers, that's better than shutting down.
I’m donating today and I wish you the best.
Would you email me (chris@extrastatic.com). I've got a few people I think would help depending on what direction you want to go in.
Fwiw moving away from AWS would probably get that bill from 7500 to 750pcm or lower. Cloud is very expensive if you've not made special arrangements or can burn VC money/free credits for your org.
As someone already mentioned please consider adding ways for monetizing, ads + remove ads, paywall, paid exercises, etc. to stay afloat.
Also please get in touch, email in bio, I don‘t have anything concrete in mind but would like to be in touch. In another life I would gladly be teaching coding, who knows maybe it works out.
Dead Comment
Somewhere along the line between 2010 - 2012 and definitely post 2013, most of the HN comments are no longer founder focused or business minded. It is unfortunate.
Or maybe they have and therefore know you can’t sustain a “business” without collecting money to pay for your expenses?
Yes, I have deep respect for the people building such a site for the better good, but asking the "how will we sustain this" from Day 1 is important (not even how to get rich, just how to get break-even).
Maybe you can reopen a free tier later, but for now you are in panic mode.
By any chance do you also donate?
I know you mentioned you don't wanna do ads, which makes sense. But if you're getting 1200 sign ups a day thats worth a lot, and id be happy to chat and see if there's a sponsor opportunity thats uninvasive and that could at least keep you going.
anyhow, you can reach me on Twitter @wagslane or via email: lane @ boot dev.
either way, hope things turn around
Dead Comment
You've probably thought of this, but it might be easier to charge a very small amount -- say $1/month, which most people even students, could afford, rather than rely on donations. If you get 1% of users paying that, it's still $20K month which is more than you're getting now. (Of course managing the payments themselves costs money).
It can still be non-profit (which is a great thing), so no one is getting rich off of it, and it doesn't poison the mission. But it could pay the bills.
Update: Processing fees are a problem as posters have pointed out, so you'd probably want to make it $10/year, or $5/six months. It's still an easily decision for a very large number of people.
Patreon has $1/month options, not sure how they do it though.
PayPal's traditional fee (for USD)[1] = 3.49% + $.3, for $1 = $0.3349
PayPal's micropayment fee (for USD)[2] = 4.99% + $.09, for $1 = $0.1349
Using that model would make sense in OP's case.
[1]: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#statemen...
[2]: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees#micropay...
[0] https://coinwire.com/cheapest-crypto-to-transfer/
Most organizations aim to survive as long as possible, so financial sustainability ($) is crucial.
I would then give a free account to anyone who asks. ("We know that even $1/month is a big ask for some folks in certain countries or they may even have a method by which to pay it. If that's you, let us know and apply for a free account here.") Then basically auto-approve (with some bot-screening mechanism) accounts that apply. Sure you'll get some abuse and people lying, but not that many people are going to lie just to save $1/month.
measuring success by how much people are willing to shift scarce resources in your direction is a perfectly good way to measure success. It's "weighted usage+reach". the remarkable effectiveness of markets in allocating resources this way is a huge achievement for civilization. I really had to scratch my head at their surprise that a non-profit oxymoron model, i mean, business model wasn't viable.
What? No.
If a business isn't able to sustain itself with its revenue, it has failed and will need to shut down. That's the definition of failure.
Lots of things can be "successful" by your metric by using unsustainable pricing.
Deleted Comment
I'm guessing fees make it not worthwhile, maybe they should negotiate lowered fees from their payment service, or figure out someone else who would give them drastically lower fee rates.
Given the state of every service becoming subscription based, I can definitely see a lot of subscription fatigue. Maybe an alternative route you could try is the annual wikipedia "We want to keep this free. Please help us buy donating". I think a lot of people appreciate the service but a lot of the times it's easy to forget that running a service like exercism can get expensive, and would be willing to donate, given a compelling enough reminder of this.
I offer a ton of free information online. I received raving feedback from people, including some that said I saved them thousands of euros. Just this week readers jokingly suggested giving me a Nobel prize or a statue. Still, donations are one percent of my revenue on a good month. They would not cover my groceries.
This is fine for me, but it's always on the back of my mind when people suggest donations as a funding method.
In my (limited) experience they mostly don't work because the people/projects that need donations are way too coy about asking for money. Donation buttons get tucked out of sight and/or cloaked in twee language like "buy me a coffee!"
I like to point to https://archiveofourown.org as a counterexample. Hardly the most critical project in the world - it's just fanfiction - and yet they raise a few hundred thousand dollars a year in public donations (solidly surpassing their budget goals) because they run an actual, clear, focused fundraising campaign twice a year.
I run a number of apps and services that don't make a dime. In fact, they cost me thousands. I don't mind.
Monetization is a real pain in the ass, and I stay away from it (for these services).
I have the ability to make a lot of money, if I choose, but that's not much fun. I don't really need the money, and I like having full control of everything I do.
I am regularly approached by folks with monetization ideas. Some, are quite good. Others ... not so much ...
Maybe I 'll pursue something, eventually, but I'm in no hurry.
Thanks for your service. Looks like a great site.
I'm sure when all is said and done, there just are not enough people like me to make a difference, but I sure hope things swing the other way. Subscriptions for everything and tips for everything are two cultural things that need to die in a fire. They are ways of squeezing more out of people, especially by taking advantage of human tendencies. It's gross and at this point I think it is unethical. Maybe not all implementations, but there are plenty that are.
So my $6 per month VPS would be about $2,000 upfront.
And a $500 game console would be a $1.50 monthly subscription. (Obviously glossing over tons of differences in say, a PS2 and a Stadia subscription)
It feels easier to ask customers for $1 per month than $360 up front... Especially since I don't know if my service will be up forever
The only way I can see this working is a recurring donation with a low enough amount that people will just set it once and forget it.
So instead of a $1/month subscription, you could try a $1/month recurring donation.
You already have the sandbox and the support for the most popular languages.
It may take some development to build out the feature but you probably wouldn't need too many to sign on to cover your costs and you could still leave your core offering free.
Have you thought of adding a hiring feature? Where people upload their CVs, and companies search (anonymously) for talent?
There is a hiring model called PPA (Pay Per Application), or monthly fees to search CVs.
Your unique selling point would be companies are not getting hundreds of custom AI CVs flooding their application; they search for what they want, and you're helping both sides.
Good luck!
edit: grammar
The general argument is - we can specifically identify talent and motivated learners/skill-possessing people, who will look for jobs. That's exactly what companies need and companies pay $5k-$10k a head during good markets for this rare STEM skill, like programming!
Problem - The people on these platforms are 70% likely to give up within 6 months or go into another field
Problem - Experience means 10x more than education to employers, especially fundamental experience
Problem - Your information on potential hires as the provider becomes outdated fast and supply-demand changes in hiring market can reduce your commissions by 50-75% in one year (as happened from 2022-2023)
I would go as far as saying these users - because they are typically earlier career - are actually worse for connecting with jobs boards/hiring than literally any random iPhone user for advertising purposes. And companies don't pay much to advertise to random iPhone users. I wish it wasn't so, but it is so according to how companies act.
If OP wants to monetise this way they should consider an affiliate programme to a CV upload or Jobs board site, it will test any appetite for hiring these people at the moment much quicker.
You could follow the Sublime Text model and basically have an honor system—if you're actively employed making more than $X, please pay us. If you're not, you're welcome to use it for free!
The Tech Resume Inside Out [0] uses this model (though not on the honor system) for similar reasons.
[0] https://thetechresume.com/
I would look to reduce server costs instead. $7k/month for 2 million users seems like a lot. Do they execute your code on their servers? I couldn't really tell from their website.
If you have an email list of 2 million… a lot of companies will pay $50-100k for a mention.
E.g., there are orgs to promote computer literacy among women; and among poor people in India; and among middle-schoolers in Africa, and so on. And he has users who are women, and who ware poor people in India, and who are middle-schoolers in Africa, and so on. But none of the orgs will give him a grant, because they can't guarantee the money will only be spent for their own target groups.
I can see why that would be kind of discouraging.
Deleted Comment
“I think it's fair to say that at this stage I've lost faith in the nonprofit business model working in a way that allows Exercism to reach any of its potential.”
Which provides additional context. Why’d you remove it? It makes it clear that he’s talking about the non-profit business model as applied to his company.
Deleted Comment
Then he goes on to say that he is upset that 96% of people stop the program. Dude, coding is BORING, but coding is hyped so much that people have high expectations so you get delusional people coming and signing up to your website.