Will charities and community groups pay for software?

Many do. The community groups I built for already paid for insurance, for hall hire and for the van, and several of the larger charities I looked at later paid for exactly the kind of software I was giving away. I never asked any of them. I built the whole product on the sentence "charities won't pay", and I never checked it.

The rota

I volunteered on Saturday mornings at a food bank near me, packing bags. The rota was a whiteboard in the back room and a group chat where people wrote "so sorry, can't make it" at 7am, leaving the coordinator to find replacements by phone.

So I built a rota for groups like that. Volunteers put their own names down. If somebody dropped out, the people who'd said they were free got a message and the first to reply took the slot. It took 2 weeks. I made it free.

It worked, and it spread, from coordinator to coordinator: food banks, a lunch club, a group that visits elderly people at home, a youth football club. Exactly the spread I'd have wanted, with one difference. Every new group meant more support and more hosting, and not a penny more income.

Generosity has running costs

The email that changed how I saw it arrived at 11:04 on a Friday night. A coordinator couldn't get into her rota, and 14 volunteers were due at a church hall at 8 the next morning. I fixed it by midnight. Then I lay awake, because a lot of people were relying on something I was giving away, and I had no idea how I'd keep giving it away.

By month 6 it took a couple of evenings a week. By month 8 I was dreading the inbox. It lived 9 months.

Decide who pays for the queue

A free product for good causes still has a support queue, and somebody pays for it. If nobody else does, it's you, in evenings. Choose deliberately: a modest price, a sponsor, a larger charity paying for the smaller ones, or a hard limit on how many groups you take.

And write down every assumption you hold about whether customers will pay. Next to each, write the name of the person you asked. Any line with no name is a belief.

Nobody Bought It has the rota's autopsy. The rules page has the rule it left.