Please forgive the insensitivity of the following question. I’ve been wondering about this for a while and now I’m (ab)using your post about your troubles and ambitions as a place to ask it: What is your thinking on charging money for the tech support part of your work?
The EA ecosystem appears to consist of organizations supporting each other for free, while being funded by a third party. How about third-parties funding only those organizations that do direct work and can’t have paying customers, and having the rest be semi-commercial, organized by market forces? (I know that this wouldn’t work for your more ambitious projects. But for the day-to-day tech support it should be possible, at least in a market economist’s dream world.)
I’ve spent a lot of time this year looking into this exact scenario and discussing various models with many people with different views. Most other EA agencies are trying to figure it out as well.
What is most likely is that I’ll move to a hybrid model where the first X hours are free, and after that, most would pay some (below market rate) fee that is offset by larger clients that can afford market rate. The main reason for this is that my data suggests around 70% of clients would have tried to solve the issues themselves otherwise, which is a huge time waste. Another reason is that there is a significant transaction cost, especially given that the funding for services like these often comes from the same sources (in the EA funding landscape) in the end.
In any case, I expect this part of the agency’s activities to be relatively small in the future, as creating public goods and services is immensely more valuable.
Please forgive the insensitivity of the following question. I’ve been wondering about this for a while and now I’m (ab)using your post about your troubles and ambitions as a place to ask it: What is your thinking on charging money for the tech support part of your work?
The EA ecosystem appears to consist of organizations supporting each other for free, while being funded by a third party. How about third-parties funding only those organizations that do direct work and can’t have paying customers, and having the rest be semi-commercial, organized by market forces? (I know that this wouldn’t work for your more ambitious projects. But for the day-to-day tech support it should be possible, at least in a market economist’s dream world.)
I’ve spent a lot of time this year looking into this exact scenario and discussing various models with many people with different views. Most other EA agencies are trying to figure it out as well.
What is most likely is that I’ll move to a hybrid model where the first X hours are free, and after that, most would pay some (below market rate) fee that is offset by larger clients that can afford market rate. The main reason for this is that my data suggests around 70% of clients would have tried to solve the issues themselves otherwise, which is a huge time waste. Another reason is that there is a significant transaction cost, especially given that the funding for services like these often comes from the same sources (in the EA funding landscape) in the end.
In any case, I expect this part of the agency’s activities to be relatively small in the future, as creating public goods and services is immensely more valuable.
Thanks for explaining! I’m happy to read that you’re discussing this with other people, too.