With only a developer team of two people dev rant sees more updates in a week, than Facebook's Windows apps see in a month.

That's because @dfox and @trogus have found the secret to not getting distracted by cat videos and stack overflow's "questions from the network" sidebar.

Please tell us your secret.

Facebook is run to make money, devRant is run for the love of the industry.

@nblackburn @dfox and @trogus need to buy coffee too. How does devrant make money?

@DeveloperACE Merch, they will get commission from each sale.

Right now the only source of revenue is the store, but it does not cover expenses. It wasn't meant to though, we launched it because people kept saying they really wanted to buy stuff :)

@dfox I am really curious how much devRant costs to run but know you are probably not able to disclose that information.

Could you add a donate option, perhaps people would help out that way?

@dfox also iAP, so we can buy avatar related stuff, themes, w/e. We want to support you guys. 😄

ofc, in order to be a fair app anything purchased by iap should be available to all users using the +1 points.

Perhaps Patreon?

@superuser I agree

I think as far as costs go, we've been pretty good at running a lean startup. Right now we have only a few specific expenses that make up almost all of what we spend.

#1 is definitely technology, mainly hosting (+ a little for monitoring, transactional email, etc.). We've made a conscious decision to spend a little more on hosting than absolutely necessary so we have some form of redundancy and solid backups of the DB. Our top cost in this department is our three database servers, which we've upgraded a few times now to make sure they (especially the master) can handle the increased load. There's definitely some tech we've held off on because of cost, but that's just analytics/stats stuff.

#2 is free swag, which does add up, but is our only form of marketing so it comes out much cheaper and is much more effective than something like Facebook ads.

That's really it right now for expenses. Of course we'd like to hire developers, marketers, etc, but we're not there yet.

As for making money - we definitely like the idea of IAP for add-on's to avatars. Everything would definitely still be available for free for specific point values, but those who didn't want to wait would be able to unlock certain items.

We're not entirely opposed to donations, but personally I'd rather not have to solicit donations from our community to stay afloat. It feels really good to think that some people would actually be willing to do that, but we still wan to try to get by without it. We think there's enough monetization avenues for the app (of course without ever charging for the core experience) that we can eventually do that.

More ideas/feedback on this is always welcome and appreciated. I hope this sheds some light on some of this stuff.