Become a contributor and get extra benefits
Tuesday, 28 April 2020
We provide all our sitemap services for free and for the love of it, but running this service on advertising revenue and donations is difficult as they are unpredictable and in recent times they have not covered our costs.In May 2018 new European Union Data Protection regulation had a significant impact and with recent world events we now find ourselves under significant financial pressure.
As a result we have brought forward plans to better manage our capacity and introduce our patron scheme which will allow people to contribute to the service and get extra benefits.
A basic free service will be maintained so that over 80% of our users will be able to continue with little or no impact while heavier users will be able to become a contributor.
Patron contributor tiers
Initially we will have 5 tiers of service which will suit the majority of our users. If you require additional services, please contact us.All our contributors will benefit from having
- No google adverts,
- No captcha human check to simplify the user experience and
Each usage tier will allow for more pages, more websites and a greater number of spider sessions in a 28 day period as follows :
- Free - up to 250 pages for up to 1 website
- Bronze - up to 500 pages for up to 1 website
- Silver - up to 1000 pages for up to 5 websites
- Gold - up to 2000 pages for up to 10 websites
- Platinum - up to 5000 pages for up to 20 websites
Payments can be made using Paypal which includes card transactions.
We will continue to review these tiers over the coming months.
For more details about the tiers please visit our contributor page.
More about our costs
We hope that by introducing this new model we'll be able to cover our basic costs include things like:- Domain names and SSL certificates.
- Web server and database hosting
- Bandwidth and storage costs
- Development and testing tools
- Software licences
- Email services
- Marketing
We need 1,000's of supporters just to cover these, before we consider time and effort invested in the service, so we really appreciate any support.
Our aims
Of course we want to do more to improve the service and by becoming a contribute you can help.- Ensuring the existing service is financially sustainable.
- Support upgrading our hosting infrastructure.
- Adding resilience and redundancy.
- Invest in development and updates to the service.
We hope that these changes will ensure the future of the service and thank you for your continued support.
Upcoming service changes
Wednesday, 8 April 2020
Over the last few months we have bee looking at the sustainability of our various sitemap solutions.Since the introduction of new EU Data Protection legislation in 2018 our ability to generate revenue through advertising has become limited.With dwindling advertising revenue from current streams and limited donations we are increasingly finding ourselves reaching in to our own pockets to fund the service.
We have been looking at options to allow the continued running and maintenance of the services as well as ways to invest in a number of key areas such as infrastructure, developer tooling, support materials as well as new services.
Having experimented with a number of models we believe that providing a patron model for a percentage of our community would be the best way forward, where we can generate more regular reliable income and offer some basic benefits as a gesture of goodwill.
With recent world events surrounding the pandemic, the need to address these challenges is ever more pressing as we find ourselves under increased financial pressure. In order to address these issues we will be accelerating the implementation of these new services as well as implementing some cost cutting measures.
- Reducing the number of pages that our spider will include in a sitemap as standard to reduce our infrastructure overhead costs.
- Tweaking our fair use policy to ensure we can continue to serve the community at large.
- Limiting the account features / saving of sitemaps
- Introducing our patron scheme which will allow contributors to support the service and also get access to more features / resources.
The final details of what this entails are still being worked on, but from our initial modelling the good news is that for over 80% of our users the service will (to most intents and purposes) be unaffected.
For the remaining users, we have identified that they are more frequent and higher volume users of the service, however the patron model will allow them to go over these limits for a nominal contribution in line with our current donation model.
Further details and final arrangements will be published over the coming days, but we felt it was important to give you some notice of these incoming changes.
We thank you for using the service and your continued support us and we wish you, your colleagues and family all the best during this difficult time.
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