Upcoming service changes

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.