Handmade Cities (HMC) is a small business wholly owned and operated by Abner Coimbre. HMC offers the following community services for free:

Free Community Services

These genuinely cost time, money, or both. However, it’s entirely self-funded by HMC. For example we never charge fees when connecting employers with engineers.

How We Make Profits

The founder makes a profit indirectly when community members subscribe to his indie project Terminal Click (TC). From a pure business lens, we might see HMC as a loss leader to occasionally promote our commercial software.

Subscribers can never pay more than the highest tier, capped at 20.00 USD per month: this eliminates whale customers exerting influence on leadership.

Revenue from TC is sufficient to cover the founder’s basic needs: rent, groceries, healthcare and simple savings. We ask community members to exercise patience whenever TC is briefly advertised. (It helps to envision an annoying sponsor from your favorite YouTuber.)

Prior to this we sold tickets for indie conferences, but it’s no longer feasible to make a living from it.

Why We’re Not a Non-Profit

Since HMC is building communities we’re often asked why we don’t switch to a 501(c)(3) or 501(c)(6).

Non-profits and open-source software are gaining in strength (which is great!) but this cannot be the sole method for transforming our industry. We must also flood the market with indie devs and small shops, and we need them to sell closed-source software for personal gain.

That’s not a dirty phrase.

This is a very competitive approach for keeping Big Tech afraid and on its toes. It makes perfect sense for HMC to practice what it preaches: we’ve been community-building as a small business for a decade.

Valve is another great example, where they hire community managers for the Steam platform.

Legacy Donations

We have a Donorbox with some monthly donors remaining. We’re grateful, but we no longer link to it anywhere: donations are declining over time, getting replaced with subscriptions to TC.

If the reader wishes to contribute, without subscribing to TC, we can always use more volunteers!