Ampwall is free for Users. This lets you create a profile, build up a library, and provides ways of getting involved with your scene without ever paying any money. You do not need to become a Member if you just want to do User things.
Ampwall asks Artists to become Members for as little as $10/year ($0.83/month) to help us build a sustainable independent music platform. Artists can upload music, sell digital audio, list and sell merch, build mailing lists, and do a ton of other things. Membership cost is determined by how much music you want to upload. It’s priced around what it costs us to host files and it helps us keep Ampwall sustainable. This approach has a lot of other benefits.
Certain assumptions tend to pop up when we talk about paid membership. Let’s start by clarifying a few things:
Put simply: we want you and your music with us. If a paid membership is a burden, get in touch and let’s try to figure it out.
One of our biggest goals is to exist as a sustainable platform that isn’t wholly dependent on outside investment capital. As a Public Benefit Company, we see this as a crucial part of ensuring we can fulfill our mission to support independent music communities and exist indefinitely.
Building a technology platform comes with a lot of costs. Paying people to do the work is the largest cost but core technology — servers, file storage, and more — is one of the largest line items. The money to pay for this has to come from somewhere. For many years now, most technology companies would fund this in a few ways, most notably through outside investors.
This outside investment usually comes with strings attached. The investors aren’t always motivated by the same things as founders. They often pressure tech companies to grow no matter what and figure out how to make money later. When “later” comes, they’re often forced to make changes that hurt their users. In other words, they built in an unsustainable way, without considering how they’ll pay their bills. The process of online platform decline as a platform shifts its goals from growth to profit is called Enshittification.
We started Ampwall using our personal savings and support from our partners. We wanted to build something that could stay up and running without outside funding because it is an important part of keeping independent music independent. So we started out by being sensitive to costs. Our membership pricing is the foundation of a deal we make with our community: you pay a token amount to get involved but together we create a buffer against enshittification. Our membership fees currently cover all of our cloud costs. If Ampwall’s entire team disappeared, the system would keep running on its own.
Let’s say for a moment that we didn’t charge membership fees. Imagine we allowed unlimited uploads and free artist pages. How would we pay to keep our tech online?
Most tech companies do this by raising money from investors. Unless they have the means to fund it themselves, they need are wholly dependent on these investors and can’t be too discerning about where that money comes from. But in a platform like Ampwall, there’s an expectation of some revenue: transaction fees.