Everything on Chill Subs right now will always remain free. We know there are many companies that create things then say ‘AHA!’ and put them behind a paywall. We won't do that, nor will we ever charge any journal for their spot in our database. If we ever create paid features, they will be new features.
But for those who don’t know: Chill Subs has no investors. It has been run full-time by two people for the past year on nothing but pocket money and sweat equity (gross) with the help of some amazing volunteers. And we’re just getting started. We’ve released about 15% of what we have planned.
So, we’ve been trying to brainstorm ways we can make money without fucking up user experience (i.e. we’re never going to load the site up with ugly Google ads and pop-ups, and we are very averse to taking on any investor who would try to change the way things are run. Our goal is to please users, not investors.).
In this vein, we’ve also released a roadmap and a stats page where we are going to keep track of all our stats, including any money we make and spend and where it goes.
So, here is what we’ve come up with.
1
Donations page
We’ve set up a donation page where people can subscribe to monthly donations and make one-time payments. We’ve come up with different rewards (badges, merch, exclusive content) for different tiers.
2
Merch (soon)
We are going to start selling some merchandise. We promise it will be awesome and well-made. We’re broke, not cheap. We will also send merch to different tiers of our supporters as thank yous.
We want to hear your opinion
↓ Here is how we plan to use ads but with open doors for feedback to make sure we don’t shit the bed for the sake of money
3
Sponsored browse
We are going to open up a Sponsored section on our browse page for any contests, workshops, lit mags, and writerly nonsense that people want to list on there. We will make sure all of these things are relevant to our community, and $30/mo donors will always have a spot on our Sponsored browse for whatever they want.
4
Newsletter ads
We were thinking of adding two ads or one ‘banner’ ad into the middle of our newsletter, with five classified spots at the bottom.
5
Native ads (future)
After looking at a ton of sites, we’ve found that best practices are apparently spamming the page with ugly Google Ads or forcing people to pay subscriptions for essential features. Fuck both of those things. We think native ads on our browse would be much less intrusive, but if anyone with experience in this field has some advice for us, we’d be eternally grateful.
