Last month we started accepting monthly and yearly recurring donations to help us monetize zapsplat.com allowing us to better cover our costs, help me to dedicated more of my time to recording and uploading more free sound effects and royalty free music and safeguard the site for the future.
So far it’s going very well and the projections look good for the site to be fully self-sustainable by June 2018. This will mean the site is able to cover its costs and also have enough money for ongoing development. Currently a lot of the costs come form my own pocket, (which is never a problem) but all being well, by June 2018, I can actually dedicated even more time to the site and grow it further.
If by the end of 2018 we are seeing an excess in monthly revenue, then we will start to look at paying sound designers and field recordists to create more free content for us. If we can do this, we aim to increase the number of new uploads to 1,000 a month. As you can imagine, this will mean the library grows into an epic resource for free audio.
Development is a huge part of our outgoings. To give you an example, from December 2017 through to February 2018 (just 3 months) we spent over £3,000 fixing bugs and introducing new features. This was an exceptional period, but even on a normal month our development costs alone can run up to £200 to £300. Add to that the cost of 2x dedicated servers, Amazon S3 storage and backups, email server costs (we send out over 50,000 emails for registrations and lost passwords etc a month) equipment maintenance and essential purchases and the site can easily spend out over £1,000 a month, sometimes more.
As the site grows these costs go up, so regular and recurring donations are absolutely essential.
So I just want to say a big thank you to all our members for making zapsplat such a fantastic resource, especially those who support the site with a donation. I just hope you get as much out of zapsplat.com as I personally go running and growing it.
Alan
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