| Author here o/ In general I've had like infrequent but large influx of money from the project, so it's hard to answer. Although I have relatively long runway, no small thanks to nlnet for their generous grant. On some level it's all a gamble. Either I try to make this work somehow, or I close up shop and keep working as an office drone, because I really can't keep doing both. My hope is that I'm able to make it work on a wikipedia-like model donation model, maybe supplemented with selling commercial API access (access is free CC-BY-NC-SA). My burn rate is literally my living expenses plus a hundred dollars per month of service costs to I don't have to be spectacularly profitable to sustain flight. ... all that is contingent on making it work quite a lot better than it does now, so I guess I have my work cut out for me. It's also a weird project, since it's had an almost absurdly positive reaction. For example, many people develop a search engine and get almost lynched on HN for not working exactly like Google or not dealing with some query as expected. Someone found a link to my barely working search engine that didn't properly support multiple-keyword queries and this happens: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28550764 |
I don't know you personally, but you come across as an earnest lone developer doing something for the passion of it. I think that goes a long way on here, versus someone giving off "portfolio project", "hire me" or "seeking investment" vibes. I've not really found a use case for your engine yet but I am really enjoying seeing your progress.