For many years now my favourite coding challenge site on the web has been CheckIO. It combines funny challenges with a decent interface and a great community component. For all these years, the site has been completely free to use and the forks behind it probably initially financed the site completely out of their own pockets and later created sections sponsored by companies like O’Reilly or Dropbox.
Turns out, that may no longer be enough to secure its future and so Alex, the original author, has turned to the community to bounce an idea back and forth and collect feedback. That idea is $2.99 per month or $25 per year for leader-boards and things like that while keeping the challenges and basic functions surrounding them free.
Personally, I wouldn’t mind paying for CheckIO but others have rightfully pointed out that this might kill the site esp. since the competition here is quite strong, also in their free segment. Perhaps a model like with Marco Arment’s Overcast using something like Patreon might be a better approach?
Anyway, if you’re using CheckIO or have ever used it for more than a couple of minutes, please chime in here!
Do you want to give me feedback about this article in private? Please send it to comments@zerokspot.com.
Alternatively, this website also supports Webmentions. If you write a post on a blog that supports this technique, I should get notified about your link 🙂