Pledgie

» see pledgie.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Pledgie was mostly a picture. A small yellow rectangle with a number on it, sitting near the bottom of a project's README or in the sidebar of somebody's site, showing how much a campaign had collected against what it was asking for. You saw it far more often than you clicked it, which was the design working as intended: the badge was a status line, and the page behind it came second.

Two engineers built the thing. Mark Daggett and Garry Dolley met at Revver, the video site, and shared an interest in open source and in Ruby, and Pledgie went up in 2007 as a Rails application. Anyone could open a campaign, name a target, and get an embeddable badge for it. Donations moved through PayPal straight into the campaign owner's account, so Pledgie never held anybody's money. For the first few years it ran on Google AdSense revenue, then from 2010 it took three percent of what came through.

This is one of the few things on this site that found me rather than the other way around. Anyone who reads open source project pages saw that yellow rectangle for years without ever registering the name of whatever was serving it. It was on Inkscape and on the Freesound Project, and it sat on GitHub repositories back when a README was the only place a maintainer had to ask for anything.

~ the case file ~

~ what it was actually used for ~

The category menu ran from Animals through to World with Charity and Health in the middle, and it described a site for community causes. The pledges described something else. The bulk of them sat under Internet and Programming Languages, which is to say that Pledgie's real user was a maintainer with a bug tracker and no income from it.

There were exceptions and at least one of them was large. A Utah blogger used Pledgie to raise a reported seventy thousand dollars for the family of Clay Sannar after he was shot in 2010, which is not the sort of weight a Rails side project built for donating to Inkscape was designed to carry.

~ the notice ~

On 5 January 2018 a line appeared at the top of every page: Pledgie is closing down 2/8/2018. The founders explained that they had never intended Pledgie to become a business, and that keeping it alive from here would take investments of time and money they were not going to make. Campaign owners had a month to move somewhere else.

The archive has the site working normally on 4 February, four days from the deadline, login form and category browser intact with the closing notice sitting above them. By 24 February the server was returning 502 to every request, and it never returned anything else.

~ where the money goes now ~

The function did not disappear, it dispersed. Open Collective launched in 2015 and GitHub shipped Sponsors in 2019, and between them they cover most of what a Pledgie badge did, with better paperwork and a funding button built into the platform where the code already lives.

What went with Pledgie was the campaign archive. Eleven years of small asks and what became of them, most of them for software nobody was paying for, and the pages that recorded all of it answer nothing now.

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