I donate 25% of my side project’s revenue to the EFF. Just made the first one – here’s what I’ve learned so far.

TL;DR: I built a pay-to-post message board, committed 25% of revenue to the EFF early on, and just made the first quarterly donation – 100% of Q1 revenue ($83.47) instead of the usual 25%. The site runs on $11/month in electricity. Looking for others who've built charitable giving into small projects early on.

A little while ago I launched Say That Sh** – a message board where you pay to post and only one message is visible at a time. To replace it, you outbid the current one. That's the entire product. Okay well, community engagement is free (likes/dislikes/comments) but you get the idea.

As a result of user feedback I made a commitment: 25% of all revenue goes to the Electronic Frontier Foundation every quarter. Not profits – revenue. Published transparently on a 'giving' page with receipts. Not to mention tons of other adjustments from feedback such as message value decay! A wealthy poster no longer makes future submissions prohibitively expensive and depending on likes/dislikes, value decays slower/faster to strengthen community influence.

Well, Q1 2026 just ended. Total revenue: $83.47 from paid messages. The 25% donation would have been $20.87. To mark the first one, I donated 100% instead – the full $83.47. After Stripe fees and all, I ended up giving more than I got haha!

**Why bother at such a small scale?**

I think this is the part most people skip, if they ever give back at all. "I'll start donating when I'm making real money." But the whole point of committing early on is that it's baked into the business, not bolted on later. The infrastructure for tracking, calculating, and publishing it is already built. When revenue grows (if it does), the donations scale transparently and automatically. As a personal commitment, it's also much easier to implement while avoiding the regulation of traditional 'we donate x% of your payment' promises.

**The business model side**

The site runs on three mini PCs under my desk. $11/month in electricity, no employees, no cloud bills. At that cost structure, giving away a quarter of revenue is sustainable. 25% of gross is high by any standard – most companies that donate do 1-5% of profits, not revenue. But when your overhead is so low, the math works differently. It helps that the project was born of passion for digital privacy and freedom of expression, coupled with a disdain for traditional social media systems with their obscure algorithms, endless scrolling, and invasive advertising. Realizing the idea was always more important than making money!

Total revenue since launch is about $86 across ~20 paid messages. Not life-changing money, but it's real – real users paying real money to say something on a website I built alone. From advertising their own businesses to political statements to reaching out to loved ones, it's been interesting to see what people say when their words are backed by tangible value.

**What I'd do differently**

If you're thinking about building a donation commitment into your own project, the one thing I'd say is: build the tracking and transparency first, before the first dollar comes in. Having a public-facing page that updates in real time makes the commitment feel real to both you and your users. It's harder to quietly drop a promise when the numbers are public. It was a bit of a scramble to get the features implemented, and an even bigger headache overthinking who I should donate to and how much.

**The honest part**

I genuinely don't know if this project will ever make meaningful revenue. The concept is weird, the market is "people who want to pay to post on a message board," and the pitch is hard to explain without someone trying it. But the giving page exists, the first receipt is posted, and the commitment is public. Whatever happens next, that part is real. I've gotten lots of feedback, both positive and negative. But it's hard making any meaningful changes for those who simply saw it as a cash grab or even called it a 'scam'. Your average person is content with Facebook and doesn't truly see the harm that traditional social media causes, let alone appreciates a platform that doesn't endlessly feed them slop, actively try to sway their opinions/wallets in sneaky ways, and track them invasively across the entire internet.

All that to say, would love to hear from anyone else who's built charitable giving into a small project from the start – did it change how users perceived you? Did it matter for growth at all, or is it purely a personal values thing?