Comment by grimmfang | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grimmfang | Hacker News Reader

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I'm really shocked at these types of comments (which I'll note have only appeared from HN) but it's worth addressing.

Nonprofits have limited resources and thus need to be able to update their own website with a tool like Wordpress or another CMS. Static templates are sometimes okay but are not an end-all solution. So far in our first three weeks since launch we have had 25 applicants - half of which require a feature that requires hosting, such as forums.

We're completely made up of students around the world trying to give extremely non-technical people a nice website for their cause. To claim "perhaps we can make an agency like Changeforge that is not doing harm to nonprofits" is blatant trolling, and in my opinion not worthy of HN.

To stomp out ANY concern anyone may have about Changeforge, and at risk of muddling our mission, I have modified our mission statement to be "We're on a mission to give every nonprofit a great website - for $150" which is now front and center on our homepage.

EDIT: I've asked HN support to alter this post's title.

GitHub can work as a CMS for most use cases. At least in most of the cases where the nonprofits wouldn't have the money to waste on expensive hosting services every month, or to deal with CMS systems bugs.

It would have been much better if you made websites static by default and only in the cases in which the nonprofits would really need a hosted solution you would do that. Doesn't make sense to do the expensive/slower solution when you can do it just when needed.

Also, static sites are much easier to convert to CMS-backed sites than is the contrary, which means nonprofits will be trapped forever with the expensive solution you made for them.

"Expensive" used here is defined as a shared hosting provider that's available all over the internet for 1-10 USD a month, correct?

And "trapped forever" is defined as the inability to copy / paste the output source of the CMS into a static file HTML, correct?

What he defines as "expensive" is ~$1-2 a month when all the websites are hosted on the same box.

My understanding of his argument is that CMS software traps the nonprofit while quite the opposite is true. CMS software actually gives a nontechnical user many more options to get work done on their site outside of the programmer community. Anyone can hire a cheap Wordpress guy.

This whole idea that we are trapping anyone or locking them into some expensive solution is laughable. One of our customers who is 70+ years old owns a nonprofit doing 1MM+ revenue/yr. He's been paying $5000 a month for their Wordpress site hosting. That means when he switched to us he saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in the grand scheme. This is an extreme case but many of our users have been overpaying for things they really don't need.

I just don't understand how anyone can criticize what we are doing as harming nonprofits. He's living in a fantasy if he thinks the average nonprofit can even understand what "static site" means.

Does the average nonprofit earn 1MM revenue?

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