As someone who's still trying to keep a local hackerspace alive, it seems like much of the organisational and grunt work, as well as financial support, has to be done by a few core people.
Many people aren't willing to financially support community spaces, especially if they haven't had the chance to develop memories from it. Many people can't seem to fathom that rent is an ongoing concern, and we'd rather someone commit to paying $32 a month than give us a one-time $100 donation.
I find it difficult to trust that people will contribute their share of work necessary to upkeep a space. Many users are slobs, and are happy to leave the space worse than it already is.
Funny I was looking at a hackerspace near me and it was $100/mo was like what... but I get it, machines cost money but yeah. I have my own workshop so don't really need it. At least your price is more manageable.
You need to have a price that is actually a barrier to consider. Low monthly fees attract terrible members that will cost you money and time and stress to deal with.
So many problems at my local makerspace went away when they bumped up the prices.
I think that's the point, these spaces greatly prefer recurring donations because a) the aggregate value is usually more than a one-off and b) they're much easier to reason about, as they're more "evened out".
'a' isn't very interesting though. Preferring more money because its more is very very uninteresting.
'b' is probably the point the person was trying to make - if they'd said "I would prefer $32/month rather than $1000 one-off" it would be a much more interesting comment, talking about the relationship between value and the commitment to the space.
> Many users are slobs, and are happy to leave the space worse than it already is.
Slobs will drive up costs and demoralize your volunteers. If you try to factor too much toxic behavior into your price, your rates will drive away your target market.
Instead, avoid toxic slobs by requiring newcomers to pay not just with money, but also with time before they get access to resources that could harm your property. In the trades, this is called apprenticeship: newcomers pay up front, but aren't allow unsupervised access to tools until they've completed several years of work under the watch of a senior practitioner. Your programs don't need to be as long, but you do need to train people about real dangers: anything from a soldering iron to a drill press can cause permanent physical injury, never-mind CNC mills and welding equipment. No one should be able to use a hot glue gun or X-Acto in your facility without first paying you and consistently physically showing up to hear you tell them how, when, why, and for how long they're allowed to use it. As part of the training, have them maintain tools -- replace 3D printer drive belts, calibrate stop switches, hit the E-STOP on your CNC, lubricate joints with the correct grease, change the blade in your jigsaw.
Once you have a trained user base, waive fees for masters who spend time mentoring apprentices.
Also, document and promote achievements in your makerspace. Did a group of three multi-skill certified masters build a working cellphone from scratch? Did your recent repair-a-thon save 100 broken appliances from the landfill with custom repairs? Did a junior apprentice fabricate a novel tool that made the news? This stuff should be on your walls! Incentivize members to make your facility and culture famous.
Gamify the credentials by celebrating member accomplishments, and advertising them on a leader board. Talk about your elite members with reverence. Talk to your new members with respect. And compliment new members who do well on things like keeping benches clean when they're finished.
Align your certifications with local trade programs. The industrial tech instructors will love it when their students come in with experience in your maker space. They will recommend your organization to students and prospective students.
Structure your org into a non profit that owns a for-profit. Solicit contributions from wealthy elites. I've heard Jeff Bezos will personally send you six figures if he thinks what you're doing is worthwhile, but 1000 other businesses will do the same if you put their name somewhere on the wall. This will provide rent-security, budget for high-end equipment. Why can't your makerspace have the world's only 12-nozzle 3D printer? Or a 10um lithography machine for making 555 timers from scratch?
With money, you can also host internships, paying undergrads to build meta functions, like setting up and hardening your IT, industrial automation, filming for your youtube channel, fundraising campaigns. With a good challenge and classy tools, your interns will make their fellow classmen jealous with incredible accomplishments to add to their resume.
Expand into a regional movement; mentor and support other makerspaces who are doing good things.
At each step you'll have to train people to carry on what you started. But you won't be worrying about slobs any more.
> No one should be able to use a hot glue gun or X-Acto in your facility without first paying you and consistently physically showing up to hear you tell them how, when, why, and for how long they're allowed to use it.
This is why I end up just buying my own tools. By the time I factor in a couple months of membership just so I can get trained up to use the machines, plus the gas & time sinks of driving to the place, I've blown the time and the money to get my own gear instead. A 3d printer, a variable power supply, a soldering iron, and all the X-Acto blades I can break cost me less than 4 months at Hacker Dojo, and they're here in my garage, and if they get ruined and set me back on my project it's my own fault.
> I’m skeptical of the term tourist trap (it’s mostly used as a term to place yourself as higher status/taste than other people, and is often used out of insecurity)
One thing I've read years ago about tourist traps is that one shouldn't be actively trying to avoid them, especially if they come from a country with higher purchasing power.
Some of these "tourist trap" activities are locals trying to make an honest living doing what they can. It should be fine to take a tuk tuk, or to buy paintings and souvenirs from people off the street.
Everyone should avoid getting ripped off, but what's 0.1% of a month's wages to a tourist could pay for an entire day's meals for a local.
I don't think people should get ripped off just because they can afford it.
If you visit Sweden, don't buy ice cream in the historic area of Stockholm ("gamla stan").
As an American you might think "$10 for a single scoop of vanilla, that's nothing. A minimum wage worker packing groceries earn twice that in an hour back home". But you are not helping a starving ice cream labourer with your purchase, you are simply being taken for a ride. Walk a couple of blocks more and check the signs, and you can buy it at half price from a respectable establishment instead. Most likely the ice cream will be better at the next place as well.
I don't think it's "ripping off" tourists to ask them to pay a price they can easily afford rather than the usual local price, ridiculously low for a tourist.
I cringe when I hear Europeans proud that they haggled to death on an African market to lower the price from "cheap" to "dirt cheap". Dude, that's pocket change for you, can't you help the local economy a bit, and help the guy feed his family?
> As an American you might think "$10 for a single scoop of vanilla, that's nothing. A minimum wage worker packing groceries earn twice that in an hour back home".
Is this a joke? $10 for a single scoop of ice cream in the US is a lot of money and also the US minimum wage is only $7.25/hour. You can barely feed yourself with the US minimum wage and you definitely can't pay for shelter or healthcare or anything else you would need to survive here, but that's a story for another time.
The current US minimum wage is so way below market wages in most places to be meaningless, though. I'm sure McDonald's would like to hire people at $7.25/hr (or better yet have robots that they don't have to pay after acquiring). But currently, they have to advertise that their starting salary for workers near me is $14/hr because if they don't they won't get anyone. Politicians like to talk about raising the minimum wage to $15/hr or whatever as if that would suddenly give working class people a huge raise, but it would simply reflect the existing reality.
Minimum wage is set by the states, 7.25 is just the national minimum. California has 16.90, Washington 17.13 etc.
If I'll update the icecone example to a single vanilla scoop costing $8.45 it still stands for a Californian.
By the way, USD 16.9/hr is on the low end of normal pay level for a IT technician or junior nurse in Sweden. Tax is highly progressive, so at that point they'd only be paying about ~18% total income tax though, perhaps that would be higher in most US states?
By my definition "tourist traps" are both low quality and high price... and also fairly easy to avoid. If you can walk three blocks away from a major attraction and find restaurants that are both cheaper and better, then the other ones are tourist traps. If they're decent quality but merely expensive due to their location, then they're charging for convenience and there's nothing much wrong with that.
One more (for me, and definitely for many others since I've seen similar posts):
It's letting me build stuff I probably wouldn't be able to build by myself without raising lots of money for way cheaper, at least until GitHub Copilot gets incredibly nerfed next month.
> OpenRouter is guaranteed to be about the highest margin operator in the business right now. Everyone wishes they'd be them, skimming 5% off as the middleman without any OpEx.
The 5% fee probably has to factor in Stripe's fees, which would be around 3% to 4% depending on whether it's an international card.
I had a similar problem with Crazy Domains: they accepted forged documentation, turned off two-factor authentication despite multiple emails from me saying never to do so, and me literally being on a call with them as it happened. The domain compromise happened as part of a plan to hijack my OG Twitter username [1].
It took getting my country's NIC and regulator involved before they restored control of my domain back to me.
I've never gotten a formal apology from them, and the incident took so much out of me that I've never gotten around to pursuing them any further.
But fuck Crazy Domains, Dreamscape Networks, and Newfold Digital (fka Endurance International Group).
> Adoption of the OSS version must not have been very high, otherwise I would have expected a Valkey / OpenTofu style, community-led fork.
I'm guessing battle-tested reliability isn't a priority for calendaring/scheduling web services, unlike Redis/Valkey.
It's probably cleaner for anyone looking to adapt the source code to point an LLM at it to extract some specs and tests, then build a new one from scratch.
> And then Face ID just fails all the time in low light conditions such that you have to light up your face with an external light to make it work. The iPad's screen light by itself isn't enough.
I've managed to unlock my iPhone in a pitch-dark bedroom just fine, for many years now.
It uses infrared dots, not visible light, unlike some of the Android implementations.
A cheap proper coffee hand grinder like a Timemore C2 would go so much further than a blade grinder that would shred the coffee beans up inconsistently.
(Buy used for even better value. Hand grinders last forever.)
Many people aren't willing to financially support community spaces, especially if they haven't had the chance to develop memories from it. Many people can't seem to fathom that rent is an ongoing concern, and we'd rather someone commit to paying $32 a month than give us a one-time $100 donation.
I find it difficult to trust that people will contribute their share of work necessary to upkeep a space. Many users are slobs, and are happy to leave the space worse than it already is.
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