I’ve been publishing Low End Mac for nearly 19 years. We’ve had our good years, which peaked around 2007. And we’ve had our bad years, one after the other ever since. We no longer pay our writers, myself included. We are a community based organization staffed by volunteers. We have expenses – hosting, phone, Internet, insurance, taxes, and the like – and for the past several months, we have had to pay much of that from our household budget. We need your help.
In the past year, we’ve spent $90 for an SSD to replace a failed hard drive in my 2007 Mac mini. That’s it for hardware expenses, and we haven’t bought any software either. We’re still getting by with an iPhone 4S, which is now 4 generations behind. We are as frugal as possible, but we have about $800 per month in expenses, and that is not being met by ads, affiliate fees, and donations at present.
Update: We have received donations from 93 community members, including 15 monthly supporters, putting us $366 over our goal. Thank you for your help and generosity!
We’re working on some changes that might help turn that around several months from now, but we’ve got a tax bill, phone bill, Internet bill, and other expenses that have to be covered. We’re asking you to consider making a one-time donation or become a monthly supporter at any level. Just click on the Donate button to the right.
To set up an ongoing monthly donation, click the box marked Make This Recurring (Monthly).
If we’ve helped you make a better choice about which Mac to buy or how to upgrade or what to avoid, help us out. If we’ve helped you sell older Apple gear or keep it going longer, help us out.
We’re not a big organization. We have no employees and minimal expenses. We’re not trying to raised hundreds of thousands of dollars – or even tens of thousands – like public radio and TV stations. Our target is $2,000 by the end of March so we don’t have to take out a loan to cover taxes.
This will be our only big fund raiser this year. In the future, we’ll just be looking forward for enough to cover our expenses and give us some funds to upgrade our aging MacBooks with SSDs so we don’t feel a need to replace them and get newer iPhones (probably a 5S – I’d love an iPhone 6 but can wait until October or so for that to become the entry-level model).
Can you help?
Thank you for your support!
Dan Knight, publisher, LowEndMac.com
Keywords: #lowendmac #support #donate
Short link: http://goo.gl/66hbV6
I have noticed your advertisements have disappeared! I don’t use an ad blocker, just don’t use Flash for obvious reasons. Too bad, you had some good ads, good specials and sales. So I figured I would chip in.
We’re still running ads, although they don’t generate much income these days. I also keep Flash blocks and block popups. We are overwhelmed at the outpouring of support since we began our fund raiser on Tuesday.
Really love this site, and appreciate your hard work in setting up and continuing to maintain such a useful and valuable resource, so thank-you. Having given a one-off donation, I was wondering how can I set up a monthly payment in support? The only option I could find on PayPal was a one-off payment?
I’ve updated the article with an image and instructions for setting up a monthly donation. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
OK, chipped in. 2008 Macbook Pro, 2011 iMac, early generation ipod. Old stuff is good stuff.