Hey guys!<p>I have this app [really basic] called "tu-dus" [htttp://tu-dus.com] that helps you with your to-do lists and so on. It's really simple right now and totally free, mainly because it doesn't cost me anything to maintain it and I made it for myself [I use it a lot].<p>I've seen that in Brazil, it's getting a lot of reviews and people are using it, despite the fact that I've never marketed the app.<p>There are a lot of ideas that I would like to put into practice to expand the app and make it more "professional", so I was thinking about revamping it a little bit, make it international and so on...<p>I didn't want to charge for it's use but I would love to see some money as a thanks or something. Maybe I'll enable file uploading and this kind of stuff, and that might cost me some money... You know.<p>Well, the question is... Is it possible to release this app as a "donationware"? Where people pay what they want as thanks or whatever? Would that work? What do you think?<p>I can see Wikipedia working like that, but Wikepedia is huge. What about a small app? Really unpretentious...
You sound like a lot of engineers I know: you devalue your own time/expertise and are not comfortable with charging for it. I strongly suggest that you move past this hangup.<p>It isn't "pretentious" to sell things to people who want to buy things from you. It also isn't hard -- if you can set up a Paypal account to take donations you can just as easily set up one to take purchases. I recommend e-junkie, they'll automate the recordkeeping and license key delivery for $5 a month.
You won't make any money that way. I know a guy who does that - he makes $300 a year. By charging for less useful stuff, I make more than $300 a day.<p>Just add some small feature like adding todo by email and make a pro version and charge $5. The people who love your app will glady support you. When you spend more than 2 weeks on a feature, put it in the 'pro' package. Take a look at how todoist.com is doing it.
I have a site that's a utility for World of Warcraft players (pugchecker.com). It sees about 2,000 uniques a day, give or take, and I've had a donation button at the bottom for a few months now.<p>In that time, I've received four donations for a grand total of $45. That's a little more than what I see for one affiliate sale using banner ads on the site.<p>It can't hurt to ask but I wouldn't expect much in the way of financial returns from donations.
Looking at the screencast, it looked very well done and beyond basic. I think you are selling yourself short when you say it's basic and not professional.<p>However, there are a ton of to-do apps -- many are free. I paid for the one I use because it's an iPhone app (Things). "Remember the Milk" is an example of a to-do app that has web and iPhone integration (and I think charges for both versions).<p>Off the top of my head, your niche looks to be non-engligh todos (in particular, Portugese). There are a lot of free to-do apps, but maybe yours is popular in Brazil simply because of that edge.<p>Start charging -- make a free plan that limits the number of to-dos so that people can still try it out and get some value. All current users should probably get the full version for free (for being early adopters) -- or at least of level that is equivalent to what they have now.
The site looks good. The screencast ( <a href="http://tu-dus.com/files/screen_pt.swf" rel="nofollow">http://tu-dus.com/files/screen_pt.swf</a> ) explains things well even though I did not understand the language.<p>I have no first hand experience in receiving donations (tried, but failed). I have heard from other people that the 0.01% to 1 % of your visitors will donate depending on your audience and your campaign.<p>If I were you, I would not expect a business to be sustainable based on donations alone.
One of the success stories of this business model is probably cyberduck (<a href="http://cyberduck.ch" rel="nofollow">http://cyberduck.ch</a>) I have heard from friends that the guy makes decent money with his "donation"-business model. Though it's more like shareware than actually just placing a donation button on your website.