Why I Started a Nonprofit

the nonprofit I started didn't start because I woke up one day and thought it would be fun to build free websites. It came from something that had bothered me for years. I've spent roughly twenty years watching the website and digital-marketing world become more complicated from the outside while, in many ways, becoming easier and cheaper for the people who actually understand how it works.

The problem is that most organizations don't understand how it works, and why the hell should they? A nonprofit exists to feed people, help families, support kids, protect animals, provide services, preserve history, build communities or do whatever its actual mission is. Its staff shouldn't need twenty years of web-development knowledge just to know whether a website proposal is reasonable.

That knowledge gap creates an enormous imbalance. If one side of a transaction understands what something actually takes to build and the other side doesn't, the person writing the proposal has a hell of a lot of control over what that work supposedly costs. Over the years I've seen organizations quoted amounts that seemed completely disconnected from what was actually being delivered.

I've seen websites priced around $20,000. I've seen projects climb toward $200,000 or more. Sometimes what came out the other side was impressive, but I've also seen expensive work that was frustrating, limited or barely functioned the way the organization actually needed it to.

The part that bothered me even more was seeing grant money involved. Federal, state, foundation and other funding can be awarded to nonprofits specifically so they can build capacity, modernize or improve their ability to serve people. Some of that money inevitably ends up paying private companies for legitimate professional work, and professional work absolutely has value. What has always bothered me is how difficult it can be for the organization receiving the grant to know whether the price it's being quoted has any relationship to the actual work required.

If an organization receives money to improve its digital presence and somehow the proposed website costs almost exactly the amount of money available, I start asking questions. Maybe there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for the number. But after seeing versions of this for years, I couldn't stop wondering how often the budget was determining the price instead of the work determining the price.

I also kept coming back to a very basic question. How can one organization need a $20,000 website while another supposedly needs a $200,000 website when, from the outside, the actual things being built can look remarkably similar? There are absolutely projects that require expensive custom engineering, integrations, security, infrastructure, accessibility work, content production and specialized expertise, so I'm not pretending every website should cost the same thing.

But I know what it takes me to build one.

For most of the websites I'm talking about, the primary thing I'm spending is time. There are infrastructure and service costs in some situations, but modern tools have driven the cost of creating and operating a strong website down dramatically when you know what you're doing. AI has accelerated that even further.

So eventually I started thinking about the problem backward. Instead of trying to determine what the “fair” price should be, what happens if I remove the biggest variable entirely?

My time costs them nothing.

That's really where the nonprofit I started came from. I know how to build this stuff, and I've decided that the hours I spend doing it are something I can donate. Suddenly the organization doesn't need to figure out whether $8,000, $20,000, $50,000 or $200,000 is a reasonable development bill because there isn't a development bill.

That changes the equation completely for a small organization. A group that has spent years assuming a professional website is financially impossible can suddenly have one. A nonprofit that would have needed to dedicate a meaningful portion of a grant toward web development can potentially put more of that money toward the reason the grant existed in the first place.

That's the part I care about.

I don't want to build the nonprofit I started around the idea that every web developer or marketing company is ripping people off, because that isn't true. Talented people deserve to be paid for their work, complicated projects can legitimately cost a lot of money, and there are plenty of organizations providing valuable professional services.

What I reject is the idea that a lack of technical knowledge should make a mission-driven organization easy to exploit.

If you understand something that another person doesn't, you can use that advantage in two very different ways. You can make the thing seem even more mysterious so the other person remains dependent on you, or you can explain it, simplify it and give them more control. For too long, I think parts of the technology industry have benefited enormously from the first option.

the nonprofit I started is my attempt at the second.

Build the website. Explain what it is. Give the organization control over it. Remove as much recurring overhead as possible. Don't manufacture complexity so somebody has to keep paying you to understand the thing you built for them.

Then move on and help the next one.

There are small organizations doing incredible work that barely have a voice online because they've been convinced getting there requires money they simply don't have. Some have probably looked at a proposal, looked at their bank account and decided a real digital presence just isn't for organizations their size.

I hate that.

The internet is too important now for visibility to belong only to organizations with large technology budgets. Being small shouldn't mean being invisible, and not understanding web development shouldn't mean surrendering a massive portion of the money you raised to actually carry out your mission.

So I'm donating the part I can donate: my time and what I know.

Maybe that doesn't fix the larger system. It doesn't have to. Every time another organization gets online without receiving a development invoice, that's money it didn't have to divert away from something else.

That's why I started the nonprofit I started.

Not because websites should have no value.

Because missions shouldn't have to overpay for access to the table.