Ask HN: Are there any successful tech non-profits?
I'm curious if there are any technology based non-profits that are cater to direct consumers where their primary business is a website/web business. The biggest one I can think of is Wikipedia; they are successful and have a very popular set of websites. Mozilla is another successful non-profit, but its primary business is not a website but a web application (Firefox). I'm not sure if Patreon is a non-profit or community benefit corporation. Do you know any others?
17 comments
Here's a list of 600+ of the largest tech non-profits https://www.ffwd.org/tech-nonprofits/
Some of my favorites which haven't been mentioned yet:
f-droid.org
calyxinstitute.org
torproject.org
Some of my favorites which haven't been mentioned yet:
f-droid.org
calyxinstitute.org
torproject.org
Patreon is for-profit as far as I can tell, givesendgo.com is a nonprofit though
The Internet Archive http://archive.org
Signal - http://signal.org
Signal - http://signal.org
I would agree internet archive is one as they have a consumer facing website/business.
https://free.law/
Among its other achievements, the Freelaw Project was instrumental in the push for recent bi-partisan legislation, signed by Pres. Biden, in the realm of ethics reform for the judicial branch.
Among its other achievements, the Freelaw Project was instrumental in the push for recent bi-partisan legislation, signed by Pres. Biden, in the realm of ethics reform for the judicial branch.
I’ve never heard of them but they seem like a good non-profit. I was more interested if there were more non-profits that had websites/web service consumers used. Their website more company landing site (but they are non profit).
> Free Law Project is the leading nonprofit using software and data to make the legal ecosystem more equitable and competitive.
> RECAP is our tool to put federal court documents in your hands
> CourtListener is our archive of legal opinions, filings, judges, and judicial financial records
> RECAP is our tool to put federal court documents in your hands
> CourtListener is our archive of legal opinions, filings, judges, and judicial financial records
If wikipedia counts, then openstreetmap is similar.
Does openstreetmap actually actually have a website I can use as a consumer? I thought they provide map data for others to use?
The top result when you google "openstreetmap"
Ghost (~$5M annual revenue).
https://ghost.org/about/
https://ghost.org/about/
I'm not sure Mozilla counts as they are a for-profit corp owned by a non-profit. But AFAIK the majority of their activity falls under the for-profit corporation.
Not sure if Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/) qualifies to the type of non-profit you're asking about.
But they've built an amazing resource to learn more about the world.
But they've built an amazing resource to learn more about the world.
This isn't totally consumer but its successful tech
https://skytruth.org/
https://skytruth.org/
Lichess - https://lichess.org/
Arguably one of the most profitable non-profits of all time: Stanford Research Institute, with a revune of $540 million (2014 figure)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International