I try to use 3rd party components whenever possible(!) The main one for Screenshot Captor is
ImageEn which of course I licensed (I've had many discussions with the author of it; I recommend all small developers reach out to other coders when using their components, often they will give you a very good deal if you ask and explain how you wish to use it).
db I know you are mad and frustrated for what you have decided dc has done, or could do to hurt your business.. I'm sorry you feel that way.
I don't think I owe you this information but..
For the record, DC server hosting costs are $415 a month -- a dedicated server hosted at Softlayer on a virtual machine, which hosts both our main site and the member site where some members have an account. It serves up 35gb a day. When we moved to the new server we were hoping it would be a bit overkill, large enough for both DC and the member server stuff and big enough we could use it to host experimental sites, but we still haven't gotten it working fast enough to feel comfortable doing that. The next time we move servers, which we do every couple of years, we may go back to non-virtual server setup. If we had time to devote to optimizing it more, we could probably do more with it. We could surely get by with a less powerful server but I still remember the old days of a forum that would regularly slow down, and I remember how wonderful it was when we upgraded our server and everything loaded fast -- it was a joyous feeling that has made me always want to make sure we have a fast server. And we've always leaned towards spending more to go with a more reliable host since I don't have the skills to take care of tricky server problems.
As for taxes, DC is files as an LLC and I've always paid full taxes and reported full money coming into the site as income, and money going out via donationcredits as expenses. That's just the simple risk averse way of doing it. As for your theory of us making $60,000 a year - ha! that would be wonderful but sadly it's not anywhere near that high. I'm not going to post the exact amount of money that comes into DC, saying nothing about how much goes out via donationcredits, but the average daily donation to DC last year was somewhere around $30 I think.
I understand you are angry at sites like DC taking away money from software companies that sell software -- I sympathize -- that's not our intention. I think you'll see the history of this site was always that it was created as an experiment to see if people would voluntarily pay for software if they didn't have to. I firmly believe the world would be a better place if people could choose how much to pay for digital content, and were more willing to do so. The dream was that this approach could bring in enough money to let me and coders like me, do what they enjoy doing, coding, and survive on it. The ironic and somewhat tragic part of the experiment is the need to spend so much time asking for money from people.. It's a weird situation and in some ways it seems so much simpler to just charge a fee for a product. I certainly have come to appreciate the straightforwardness of just selling an honest product for an honest price -- and I've lamented quite a bit in the recent years against the ad-supported "free" nature of web services, in favor of a more straightforward fee-for-service approach. So my views are evolving on this stuff too. But I am proud that DC has managed to stay true to it's vision of letting people pay what they want for our software, and I don't want that to change. I'm sorry if you feel it hurts your business by taking away business. That's not my intention.
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