Starting Funding on Indiegogo
We’ve launched FindALostPet on Indiegogo to get the money we need for image hosting, SSL certificates and other domains.
A Quick Summary
We’re a group of one thirteen-year-old and two fourteen-year-olds going to school in Coquitlam and Surrey BC. Stefan’s a digital artist, social media expert and “techy. “Alin’s a digital artist and hardware expert. And Laef’s a programmer, writer and social media “person.”
We’re working on building a website and app where people will be able to post their lost pet and other people will be able to report if they see the pet. Right now there are hundreds, probably thousands of lost pets across North America and we want to bring them home.
Though this idea has been attempted before, it has never been taken to it’s full potential. For example, no one’s created an app! When you hold in your hands an easy way to report the lost pet crossing the road, you’ll do it!
Since this is such an important task, we want to do it right. The project is set up as a .org that will make no money, but unfortunately this means that there are many things we can’t pay for. You can help get this off the ground!
Where Your Money Will Go
Since the beginning of this project, we’ve been paying for the development and hosting of the website ourselves. This includes $25 per month to pay for hosting. Unfortunately this hosting does not give us enough space to host the many photos of lost pets that people would upload and we don’t have enough money to pay for better hosting or image hosting elsewhere.
Since this challenge came up a week ago, we’ve been searching around for free image hosting but none fulfill our needs. As soon as we resolved on funding it on Indiegogo, we began looking for the cheapest of the paid-for hosts for data. This brought us to Google which provides storage at $0.026 per Gigabyte per Month. Compared to many other companies that provide storage at up to $100 dollars per month for just 20GB, this is incredibly inexpensive.
Once resolving on Indiegogo, we added in a couple other things that had been nagging at us for the last few months of development but that we had not been able to pay for. After adding them all in, along with Indiegogo’s 5%, we’ve costed the end price to be $435.07. Here are all the components, including tax, that make that up:
• $50 for an SSL certificate (this means that when you visit our website, your connection will be secure and safe)
• $15 to pay back our principal for buying us FindALostPet.org
• $30 ($15 each) to buy FindALostPet.com and FindALostPet.net and redirect them to the .org
• $300 for the website hosting for a year (right now our parents are paying for it but we want to change that)
• $19.35 for the image storage with Google for two years (1GB per day, 31 days per month, 24 months)
• 5% of the total added to pay Indiegogo ($20.72)If we don’t reach our goal, we’ll pay first for the image storage, then for the SSL certificate, then for the website hosting and finally for everything else.
On the other hand, if we get more than what we need, we’ll use it to pay for continued use of the SSL certificate, hosting and Google storage for a couple more years, as well as for online advertising for this project.
Thank-You Perks
By creating this Indiegogo campaign, we gave ourselves another problem: What should we give to those who took time to donate when in the end we’re creating a free product that we want everyone to be able to use? Well, first off is your name on the website’s donors’ page. The bigger your donation, the larger your name and the higher up you will be!
The top few donors will get a nice Christmas card thanking them for their help. Since we’ll be paying for these out of our own pocket, we’ll only be able to send out ten or so.
If you’re one of the first ten or so to donate $50 or more, we can give you one of the following:
1. We can build a small personal, project or business website for you. Nothing on the scale of a service like Google but a few static pages with pretty much whatever content you want (nothing inappropriate though).
2. We can look at your website and give some design critique on user experience, visual content, text content and your social media presence. This is the one sure way to get all three of us to put something into your thank you perk because we all enjoy improving people’s websites!
3. If you’re an educator (or student lobbying your teachers for more speeches), one of our group could conference call into your school to talk about our project, programming and how students can change the world.
You can read more and back our project our here.
