Why placing bounties should be free

[nathanathan]

1. Charging fees for placing bounties may or may not affect the number of bounties people place, but it certainly does not cause people to place more bounties.
2. Bounties are good for marketing. People discover Bounty Source through seeing bounties placed on projects they are involved in (e.g. [module request] modules that allow reading from and writting to a database meemoo/meemooapp#134 (comment))
3. Bounty Source has a lot of growth potential. Github has 3 million users. Freelancer.com reports 9 million users. With only 10,000 users I think BS could easily expand by a factor of 10 or even 100. Right now I think growth should be the first priority rather than turning a profit. It wouldn't be a bad idea operate at a loss in order to do promotions that encourage people to place more bounties (e.g. place two bounties and get 5$ added to your next bounty).
4. Bounty Source doesn't need to charge fees to make money. If there is always at least one bounty going, Bounty Source will always have a reserve of money available to it. The more bounties that are on the site, the deeper the reserve will become. There will be some level that the reserve will be extremely unlikely to dip below unless there is some unforeseen event that causes people to stop placing bounties en masse. Bounty Source can invest the money from the reserve (up to a "safe" level that it doesn't dip below) and make a profit from the returns. This is similar to what banks do when they loan out the money people put in their savings accounts.

---

Want to back this issue? Place a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[rappo]

@nathanathan this is a long time coming, but thanks for the feedback! We've changed our fee structure such that:

• There's no fee for placing a bounty. You still have to pay upfront, but there's no additional charge beyond the bounty amount
• There's no fee for collecting a bounty. You can reuse the earned money within the system fee-free as you wish
• There IS a fee on cash out.

https://www.bountysource.com/fees