[axiom]

Off topic: if you look at the kickstarter page for Diaspora http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-p...

Notice how for anyone who donates more than $5 they need to send them a CD with Diaspora on it. $25 gets them a t-shirt etc.

For 6k donors, they're going to spend ~$50-100k of the $200k they raised just meeting their commitments. Not to mention a huge amount of time dealing with the logistics.

Edit: Jesus, if you account for the fact that they promised 1 year hosted service, and 1 year phone support for anyone who donated more than $350, these guys are already underwater.

[synnik]

IF their product is such that an end user needs hosted service and phone support in the first place, they are worse than underwater.

[omgsean]

Yeah no kidding, I'm sure people are clamoring to get on a social network with thousands of sweaty nerds and 10 women. They may as well just release a MUD.

[ElbertF]

This is why WordPress will never take off.

[robgough]

Why the downvotes? Do we not care for sarcasm on HN?

I think it's a appropriate response too. Wordpress does both hosted and open source, and by all accounts they're doing OK.

[DrSprout]

>Jesus, if you account for the fact that they promised 1 year hosted service, and 1 year phone support for anyone who donated more than $350, these guys are already underwater.

By "hosting" they mean 1 year of a Diaspora account on their server. So essentially that's 30/month for unlimited photo and text uploads to a walled garden site. I'm pretty sure they're fine.

[axiom]

I really hope so. I guess there's no SLA so they're not obligated to provide any particular level of service.

Anyway, I believe the phone support is a much more serious liability.

[stcredzero]

Why couldn't phone support be crowd-sourced as volunteers in 100's of "party-line" style chats?

[wmf]

Why would I pay for volunteer support?

[olefoo]

three possible ways to address your concern:

1. You're paying for the infrastructure that the support volunteers need to do their job.

2. You receive value for it. If the answers help save you time and money, do you care what motivates the people providing them?

3. You and the volunteers are both supporting a broader effort.

There are plenty of organizations that rely on volunteers that also charge user fees to support their mission; any museum with a docents program, park guides, ushers at the symphony, schools that rely on PTA volunteers to cover unfunded positions. It's not exactly radical.

[stcredzero]

In that case, it would be a voluntary donation.

[kwamenum86]

How do you arrive at this figure? When you purchase items like t-shirts and cd's in bulk you usually get a pretty sizable discount.

[bkrausz]

I looked into it...he's a little high for just flat cost, but there is a lot of labor I didn't account for:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1382563

[axiom]

COGS + shipping + logistics

Also, founders' time, which is probably the most costly part.