Herman @ Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
@bear

Hi, I'm Herman

I am the creator and maintainer of ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Bear, a privacy-centric, super fast blogging platform. This project started out as a personal blog, and turned into a minimal blogging platform for the masses (we currently have more than 3,000 blogs running on Bear with more signing up every day).

It has gotten to the point where I need to open up the conversation around how this project monetises due to the cost of hosting and maintenance.

Most “free” websites subsist by selling ads or selling user data. Others do it by putting all the good stuff behind paywalls.

Firstly, a few things that won't change:

• All the existing features of Bear will remain free of charge, forever.

• Bear will never sell your data.

• Bear will never have ads.

My preference would be for all new features under development and into the future to be free for everyone. This can only happen if I manage to build up a donation base. My goal is to hit $500 per week. This will cover the cost of servers in their entirety as well as some change to spend on coffee while I build out these new features.

Here's what I have planned in the near-to-mid future:

• Newsletter subscriptions (you can see this running on my personal blog right now)

• Notifications of new posts to subscribers

• Send emails to subscribers from your dashboard (maybe, this has the potential to be abused)

• API support

• Email-to-post

• LaTeX support

• etc

As an incentive to support the project, I will be making these new features only available to sponsors contributing $5/m or more until the funding goal has been reached, in which case I will make all the features publicly available.

NB: Make sure to email me at <hi@bearblog.dev> once you've donated so I can upgrade your account.

Let's make the internet awesome ＼ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ／