I have some work in progress for a paid plan for Tiddlyhost. Hopefully it will be ready for launch later this year. And yes, Tiddlyhost is open source.
I’d be first in line for a paid Tiddlyhost plan (and already donate a modest monthly amount voluntarily, despite living in the red, just because I can’t justify not supporting Tiddlyhost). For comparison: I am trying to back out of paying evernote, which I still pay a subscription fee for, even though I love tiddlywiki so much more. (One challenge is that I have so many images locked up in old evernote notebooks…; the other challenge is I have a family plan, and less geeky family members are not into Tiddlywiki, partly because of the image issue.)
On that note, one thing I’d be delighted with – which may play nicely with paid plans – is the ability to use saq’s File Uploads plugin with a tiddlyhost module. I’d much rather host from tiddlyhost than github, but my github sites are outfitted with the ability to upload images, which sure is convenient compared to my current tiddlyhost setup (dropbox hosting with 10-15 seconds of link-setup per image). Ideally, the images could be located within a user’s directory such that they could be shared between wikis. Presumably there would be account tiers, based on some combination of number of wikis and maximum size of the virtual directory required… Maybe such things deserve a separate thread if/when the paid subscription model is up and running.
Please keep us posted on your progress!
-Springer
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I would be happy to help with the uploader part of things if Simon decides to support image/file uploads.
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Good suggestion - I like the idea. TiddlyWiki makes a pretty good photo album if the images are not embedded in the TiddlyWiki itself.
I filed Issue 236 to track this.
- Yes, this would be powerful
- Yes, potentially an Evernote killer
TiddlyHost, File uploads plugin and storage
This is where one would expect to pay, but it also may add a storage management issues for @simon because anyone using the file uploads plugin can quickly make use of a lot of storage.
- Depends on your current hosting if this is easy, difficult, scalable…
I am keen as the File Uploads plugin matures, and once I can wrap my head around it, to at least implement a wiki with File Uploads plugin, that I can access on my local computer or LAN. The key reason being compated to internet hosts, we have almost unlimited local storage and it makes it practical to start using tiddlywiki as an image/pdf or file organiser (or if one day If could use my Terabyte of OneDrive storage).
Eventually I can see myself
- Paying for a tiddlyhost + storage and File Uploads plugin / Fusion implementation (private or public use)
- Community purposes, Hosting my own tiddlyhost on my own servers
- Commercial purposes, Hosting my own tiddlyhost, or variations of it, on my own servers
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I would happily pay for this, just because TiddlyHost now (and previosly TiddlySpot) have been real life savers regarding using TW in educational contexts and the easiest way to teach it. I would like to have some features like domain redirection and/or templates support, but even without those features, if a montly/yearly pay option becomes available, I would like to support it.
Marketing wise, I don’t know how much the fees will be. I think that something like the cheapest Digital Ocean (DO) virtual server could be a good fee, considering that TiddlyHost doesn’t have the scales of DO and is a pretty important custom development for the TW learning community. Of course, anyone can put their intended fee for the services they provide. But I think that the valuation exercise usually doesn’t take into account the differences between educational uses and the Global South / Global North prices. Hopefully TiddlyHost will do it.
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Thanks. I’m aware and recently did it.
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What sort of payment plans did you have in mind?
Are you going to go the route of a monthly plan for increased storage, akin to dropbox and google, or were you thinking of a 1 time payment per tiddlywiki?
limits example
- custom name dns “john-com”(paid) → “john tiddlyhost.com” (free)
- storage: 2g(free) → unlimited(paid) or 1TB as google workspace: 1tb, 15GB, unlimited(enterprise) - another limit can refer to the amount of pages maybe something like 100,000 notes like evernote
- plugins
- themes
- support
- contract time and support service
- technical assistance or not
With tiddlywiki not needing a lot of space I think 200mb would be enough for a free plan.
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That sounds like a good number, maybe even a tad high for some lighter users, but it’s better to have that extra wiggle room for storage of multiple tiddlers than to not have enough! (and it isn’t like 200mb is an excessive amount!)
I’m currently looking at my folder of every backup I have since first starting my usage of TW and it’s only 102mb! 
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Good! Good you may get cash back!
It also, in the modern net environment, makes sense I think?
Since it is a hosting service the models around that may work, for you too, are …
1 - Free — (limited space, no direct support)
2 - Standard — paid (space costed, with support)
3 - Premium — paid & with design (space costed, with support, initial wiki designed & loaded up by a dev you’d partner with???)
Just ideas, TT
Footnote to my last. One issue with TiddlyHost is the server startup performance is not the best in the universe at the moment 
… maybe paid plans could get slightly better performance?
Just a comment
TT
I noticed some comments on “re-direction” … I don’t think that an issue as, as far as I can see, the re-directs would be TO TiddlyHost, not the other way around.
Though it might be worth explaining that to folk who want to use personalised web addressing?
Just a comment, TT
Thanks all - I appreciate the enthusiasm and the ideas being suggested. I’ll add a few notes here in no particular order:
- FYI the mechanism for subscribing (using stripe.com for payments) is mostly complete. I haven’t tried it for real in prod yet, but it seems to be working okay in development mode. I expect there will be some loose ends and details to figure out before it’s 100% ready for launch.
- So, the next steps for me are to figure out what are the distinguishing features between the paid plan and the free plan, and writing the code to make it all happen.
- One feature for the paid plan I’m considering is to have older versions of sites available to be reviewed and restored if desired. This might be convenient if you accidentally delete something you didn’t mean to delete. Tiddlyhost would allow you to roll back to a previous version. There’s still a bunch of work needed to implement that and make it ready for use. Also there’s an impact on storage needed that I need to consider.
- The space allocation distinction is a good suggestion. I’ll first need to implement a way to enforce the storage space limits, so it’s not entirely trivial, but maybe that’s good enough feature for the paid plan to begin with.
- I really like the idea of BYO domain names. I don’t have a clear idea how much work it would take to hook up the DNS and the Letsencrypt, but right now it seems more fun that the “restore previous version” feature. On the other hand, it’s more of a “power user” feature, so less likely to be interesting to the average TH user. (What do you think?). I do want Tiddyhost to remain focussed on the less-tech savvy user, and to be aware that those users are probably under-represented on forums like this one.
- The suggestion about providing a wiki design service is interesting, but for now at least it doesn’t appeal to me much. I think that could be separate from Tiddlyhost. (If someone wants to provide such a service, please go ahead!)
- Re stability and performance, Tiddlyhost hosting is currently low budget to keep costs down, which does impact the stability, but that can change gradually over time, especially if the paid plans become popular. My own tech knowledge of the best ways to host/deploy/manage applications in the cloud is also a factor here.
- Another todo/blocker for launching the paid plans is that I need to write a terms of service and a privacy policy. (I suppose I can find some suitable examples/templates online, but I’m open to suggestions if anyone has experience with this kind of thing.)
- Speaking of legal questions, there’s probably a need eventually to separate “Tiddlyhost the software” from “Tiddlyhost .com the service”. E.g. I don’t think the TH .com logo and my deployment configs for TH .com, should be licensed the same way as the underlying application code. There are plenty of projects out there in a similar situation, so I expect there are good solutions available.
- FYI Tiddlyhost is a weekends and evenings project for me, so progress can be slow and unsteady depending on various factors. That said, I am enjoying it a lot, and I’m optimistic about getting it to realize its full potential. Along those lines, constructive feedback from the community and from Tiddlyhost users is much appreciated and helps with motivation and with figuring out what to focus on next. So, thanks!
-Simon
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I had meant to respond before now, to help in your Journey.
- Do consider a tower Hanoi backup rotation to minimise total space needed.
- If only providing to Premium consider giving premium extra space to account for this maintain inside the same quota.
- Perhaps don’t enforce, just Inform and charge more, especially if technically difficult.
- There are different approaches to this but there are
- some minimal ones with little effort on your part and server
- More advanced ones with a Panel interface
- And others with special features and Zone records etc… which you can package and sell as an additional service, with easy to set up options.
- The main thing is to protect your rights and ability to take down stop serving.
- In some ways you are not responsible for content
- Showing you will not use and don’t own others content is essential
- Recognising what ever you or your clients do are subject to law (jurisdiction varies)
“Tiddlyhost the software” from “Tiddlyhost.com the service".
- I am interested in setting up a similar server, not in direct competition, but for other services. So yes please differentiate.
- ideally open source solution with purchasable services and support
I have a suggestion: maybe paid users could host non-tiddlywiki files in their tiddlyhost “folder” ? This would make things like setting up a RSS feed much easier (see https://talk.tiddlywiki.org/t/new-tiddlywiki-newsletter-beta-work-in-progress) since a GitHub account wouldn’t be needed.
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And like wise static tiddlers and landing pages for more Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) juice.
- however this could add complexity to achieve this, with a file dashboard etc… but I expect there are Open Source solutions out there.
This would play nicely with image hosting if it’s possible to follow through on saq’s uploader:
-Springer