Donations

[admin]

DAN has a new button in the menu bar: for donations. The DiamondAviators.Net needs to improve further and your support is welcome. We added a donations-link and PayPal-button. It will work with PayPal or credit cards.

If you like DAN and wish to support it, check out our donation site: Donate!

Thank you very much!

[Kai]

Thanks for all donations received so far! You guys rock! Apart from your participation your help is greatly appreciated. Quite frankly, I don't care how much it costs me to run this forum as I get a so much back from you which cannot be paid in money.

Nevertheless, I will try to give a bit of an overview of what this site has cost me so far or what recurring costs there are. I never meant to have an exact accountancy on this and I would just like to give a few statements so you get a bit of an idea:

422,40€ for 12 months server lease
113,32$ for a 5-year renewal of Diamondaviators.net, but I also own a few other domains which are redirected to DAN, so let's say 60$ for a year
100$ monthly system maintenance for my coder who used to work for me full-time but when I "retired", he kept a few odd jobs. I agreed to pay him 100$ monthly to maintain DAN and its server. His name is "Miao" and in the last 6 years of working together we have become very good friends. I should eventually mention this on the site and maybe help him promoting his business as he is a freelancer now.
1000$ for the reports-section script
500$ for the market-crawler script
200$ for the world-map
250$ for a linkbuilding campaign paid to Gamit Linkbuilding (we have an "internal" PR 5 now)
220 $ for sending postcards to 890 Diamond owners in the US (was it with "Cactus" mailing?)
100$ approximately in Paypal fees for receiving donations

On this server I also host 3 private domains which make up maybe 1% of the total traffic on this server.

[Star57]

We need to get the donations going, Kai wants to upgrade to a DA62

[Kai]

We need to get the donations going, Kai wants to upgrade to a DA62

Thank you, Frank! The idea of helping me fund a DA62 is excellent and must be applauded.

Now, seriously: Donations are exceeding my expectations and currently the needs. Thanks again to everyone who donated so far! If there are any ideas on what to change, fix or improve, please, let me know.

[CFIDave]

The idea of helping me fund a DA62 is excellent and must be applauded.

Kai: To better help you prepare for ownership of your new DA62 , how about creating a separate DA62 Forum on the site? Seriously, it would be helpful for us to have a place to contribute and discuss what we know about this EASA-certified aircraft.

[Kai]

Kai: To better help you prepare for ownership of your new DA62 , how about creating a separate DA62 Forum on the site? Seriously, it would be helpful for us to have a place to contribute and discuss what we know about this EASA-certified aircraft.

Good idea. I have just created the DA62-forum.

[Enrouk]

done for me.

[Kai]

Here is an updated list of the last 20 donations. In total, my PayPal account has received over 1100€ since I put up the donation link again. It "feels" enough, so I deleted the donation link and will put it up again according to the needs of DAN. Thanks a lot for the support!

[dmloftus]

Here is an updated list of the last 20 donations. In total, my PayPal account has received over 1100€ since I put up the donation link again. It "feels" enough, so I deleted the donation link and will put it up again according to the needs of DAN. Thanks a lot for the support!

diamonddonations.png

Hi Kai,
I'd like to renew activity on this thread. I am so thankful for this forum. I became interested in Diamonds a couple of years ago as a renter and finally got around to buying a DA40 XLS six months ago. This forum has been so useful in helping me become familiar with a myriad of important topics as a new owner. The financial value of this forum has far exceeded the value of my modest initial donation. I'd like to understand if overall member donations have kept pace with your expenses to provide this incredible service to all of us. I'm certainly willing to pitch in more if needed. Please let us know if you can use an early Christmas present. Thanks so much.

Gratefully,
David

[Chris]

The financial value of this forum has far exceeded the value of my modest initial donation. I'd like to understand if overall member donations have kept pace with your expenses to provide this incredible service to all of us.

Thanks to Russ's thread from last January, we had enough donations in 2020 to cover pretty much all of the expenses for the year. The costs have come down a fair bit since Kai originally set it up, mostly due to lower server costs, switching SSL certificate vendors, and not doing much in the way of new feature development. The latter is more because of my lack of time and energy than lack of funds.

Like you, the value I get from the forum exceeds whatever I might need to spend to cover any gaps in donations throughout the year. I honestly don't even keep track when that happens since it pales in comparison to pretty much any other expense related to flying.

I see a donation from you just hit the PayPal account. Thanks for helping to keep the lights on!