📢 Community Q&A - How should we monetize Hashnode/Devblog?

First of all thanks for being a Hashnode member. You motivate us to work harder everyday and therefore a big shout out to all of you. 🙌

We've been running Hashnode for more than 4 years now, but the love and traction we are seeing right now is better than anything we have seen before. Ultimately, a business has to make money and we think this is the right time to start thinking about it.

We have a bunch of ideas, but we need your help. I'll outline a few of the potential monetization options -- please go through them and write down your ideas/suggestions/feedback in the comments below. We would like to involve the whole community in figuring out a suitable business model for Hashnode.

Here is what we have in mind so far:

💡[Devblog] Buy us coffee

We charge ~ $2/month (buy us a coffee) for a premium account. It'll give you certain privileges such as:

Ability to create multiple team publications
Ability to integrate Adsense (we can discuss this further)
Private blog posts (for your eyes only)
More customizations with custom CSS & JS
More integrations (e.g. ability to add Mixpanel and similar options)
Deep Analytics
Static Pages, Custom 404 pages and so on
Early access to new features
Pro account badge
... and so on

There will always be free accounts. Pro account will be a way for us to raise money directly from our users by providing premium features. If this makes sense, we can discuss further and decide final list of premium features to offer.

💡[Hashnode] Marketplace

Marketplace is another monetization option. We'll build something like Upwork inside Hashnode and help developers monetize their skills. For every transaction, we will charge a small fee. There is a lot of scope for improvements here and we believe we can create a better dev-centric marketplace inside Hashnode.

💡[Hashnode] Recruitment

With Devblog, we are onboarding smart developers into the platform everyday. We can build a hiring platform in Hashnode to match developers with tech companies and charge the companies a fee for every successful hire. Hiring is still very difficult and tricky -- this has the potential to go big and if done right we can build a very successful business.

💡[Devblog] Training and Courses

We already have authors who are using Devblog to publish articles on various tools and technologies. We can enable authors to release paid courses and tutorials and help them make money -- these courses can be both video and text based. Like the marketplace, we can charge a fee every time we help an author make a sale.

Hashnode is turning into a network of independent dev bloggers. Although our promise is to keep Hashnode ad-free, we can consider inserting "ethical ads" into the blog posts and share the revenue with authors. I don't want to go down this route, but we would like to know what all of you think. If you feel comfortable with this idea, please provide your feedback and suggestions. If the majority of the community doesn't agree with this, we'll not pursue the idea. But if this gets traction, we are happy to discuss more and figure out a way to make this happen. But be assured that we'll never insert ads into your blogs without your consent.

We are still brainstorming and discussing these options internally. If you have any feedback or ideas for improvement please add a comment. If you have a different idea, we are more than happy to hear it out. Do post it even if it sounds silly! 😉