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Ask HN: Are there any successful tech non-profits?
20 points by samemail88 on June 27, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 17 comments
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?


The Internet Archive http://archive.org

Signal - http://signal.org


I would agree internet archive is one as they have a consumer facing website/business.


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


Lichess - https://lichess.org/


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?


https://www.openstreetmap.org


The top result when you google "openstreetmap"


Ghost (~$5M annual revenue).

https://ghost.org/about/


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.


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.


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


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


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.


This isn't totally consumer but its successful tech

https://skytruth.org/


Patreon is for-profit as far as I can tell, givesendgo.com is a nonprofit though




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