One a Month Club

I wrote the other night, after several hours of keyboard-mashing, mouse-clicking, and DNS-wrangling:

Too tired to write a proper introduction post, but I’m happy to say that oneamonth.club is now a thing that exists! It’s something I’ve wanted to put together since being inspired by @manuelmoreale.com. Please send me more sites to feature! And you can support my site for $1/month at dingus.club. 🫶

Well, I’m not much more mentally awake right now, but I am excited to tell you about the One a Month Club. It’s an idea, inspired by Manu Moreale, that kindness from internet strangers can be enough to support a small web project. And that tiered membership overly complicates things. And that it’s hard enough to convince someone to pay anything to support your work, so why would you want to gate any of those fans from seeing what you’ve worked so hard on for them?

We all want writers, code wranglers, and other web artists to be able to get the monetary support they deserve while reaching the widest audience they can.

It manifests like this. To join the One a Month Club, the asking price to support your work and gain access to all of it should be as little as $1 per month. It’s low enough that if someone has any budget at all to spend on extras, they can afford $1 per month. They can set it and forget it, as it shouldn’t make a meaningful impact on their budget. And, as they say, we’ll make it up in volume. Oh, and folks can choose to pay more if they want to. But that’s optional.

Really, you should go read Manu’s blog post about landing on $1+/month as the ideal singular tier for membership. It’s how I got here.

Anyway, ever since reading that post and following suit with my own $1/month supportership at dingus.club, I thought there should be a page that rounds up all the sites and projects that adhere to this framework. A page like nownownow.com or uses.tech. I kind of thought Manu would make one. Instead, it lived in my head and my to-do list rather than on the web for months.

With the introduction of Micro.blog’s single-page sites in January, I knew I could make it a reality. The perfect domain name was available and reasonably priced. I snapped it up as the last piece of the puzzle. (Since the initial idea wasn’t really mine and I see myself as more of a caretaker of it, I’d feel a little weird about hosting the project on my heydingus.net domain and site.)

With a few minutes spent setting up that single-page site in Micro.blog, a few more minutes searching around the web for more sites that meet the $1-for-everything criteria, and many more minutes tweaking the design while waiting for DNS to propagate, oneamonth.club was born.

The web travels fast

As far as I can tell, Manu doesn’t use social media, so I couldn’t adequately notify him with a mention in that initial announcement on my microblog. I intended to send him an email as a heads-up about putting the site together and to open the door for any suggestions, but I wanted to make sure I was happy and settled on its presentation first. Much to my surprise, the next day (yesterday) I already received a request to be added to the site. The inductee said they found it through Manu’s blog.

He’d already found the site and linked to it. Wow! 😅 Turns out, he had been considering putting a similar page together himself after all. I suppose we can both cross that item off our lists now.

Join the club

The club is open to anyone who wants to join.¹ As Manu put it in our brief email exchange about the project:

Honestly, I just want more people to jump on board because I’d love to support a bunch of different blogs. We need more of this to keep the web open and sustainable.

So open your tip jar (Ko-Fi and Buy Me a Coffee are pretty popular and easy to use), and send me links to it and your project. And take a look through the sites already listed there. Maybe you’ll find an awesome new site to help prop up. I have! Let’s keep working on that open and sustainable web together. 🙌