You can now chip in for the servers
Orthodate has a free tier and we intend to keep one. The bills are real though, so there’s now a way to chip in. It lives on Buy Me a Coffee rather than on a checkout of our own, and we’ll explain why below. Two things we want to say plainly before anything else: it is not tax deductible, and it buys you nothing extra in the app. Not a badge, not a boost, not more people in your daily batch.
What changed
Handled off-site, in one link
Buy Me a Coffee takes the payment and sends the receipt. There is no payment page on our site, and no card details come anywhere near us.
Not tax deductible
Orthodate is a for-profit company, not a charity. That sentence is in the FAQ below and wherever the ask appears, because it is the part people most easily misread.
Buys nothing in the app
No perks, no visibility, no badge. The moment a contribution changes who you see, it stops being a gift and starts being a paywall.
Where the money actually goes
Four bills, in the order they get paid. Hosting and the database come first, because the app has to be up. Safety review comes second: every verification selfie and every report is looked at by a person, and that person’s time is the single most expensive thing we buy.
Third is support, which is now a real ticket queue rather than an inbox somebody gets to eventually. Fourth is research — the parish directory, the city guides and the resource library are all maintained by hand, and the fact-checking behind them takes longer than the writing.
None of that is glamorous. It is, however, exactly what this costs to run honestly, and we would rather show you the list than run a campaign about changing lives.
Why it moved off our own checkout
This first shipped as a page on our own site with a card checkout on it. That page is gone now, and the honest version of the story is that our payment processor told us to take it down.
Their agreement does not allow accounts to collect donations, and they were right to read ours that way. Orthodate is a for-profit company, and a for-profit passing the plate through a card processor is a problem however carefully the page is worded. So the checkout went, the page went, and the ask is now a plain link out to Buy Me a Coffee, who do exactly this for a living.
We would rather write that down than quietly swap a button. An update log with no mistakes in it is a marketing page wearing a disguise.
Why we won’t call it a charity
There is a very tempting version of this that uses the word “donation” loosely, drops a cross into the header and lets you assume the gift is deductible. We are not going to write it.
Orthodate is a for-profit company. A for-profit soliciting “charitable donations” is a problem with every payment processor there is and a problem with the Federal Trade Commission, and more to the point it is a lie told to Orthodox Christians about money, which is worse than either. So we say what this is in plain language, every time we say it at all.
If you would rather give to something deductible, give to your parish. We mean that.
Other ways to help that cost nothing
Money is the least interesting thing you can give a young app. In rough order of usefulness:
- Finish your profile. Half-built profiles are the main reason a small feed feels smaller than it is.
- Tell one person in your parish. Word of mouth in a church community beats every ad we could buy.
- Post on the feedback board. The distance options that shipped this week came from a single post there.
- Send us your story if you met someone here. It is the only evidence that any of this works.
Since this was published: paid plans exist
Two days after this went up, Orthodate+ and OrthodateX went live. They are a different thing from the link above, and the two deliberately do not touch. A subscription is a product: it has a price on the page, features attached to it, and a cancel button in Settings. The support link is a gift with nothing attached, and that has not changed.
We are adding a paragraph rather than editing the post to imply the order of events was different. The promise further up — that chipping in buys you nothing in the app — is exactly why the two are kept apart, and it is easier to keep that promise when the paid thing is openly a paid thing.
Try it