Save Larry Birdle!
Donation protected
Hi, my name is Jacob Tepperman. You may know me as the creator of Larry Birdle (seen here on KOT4Q's channel). I'm not going to bore you with the story behind the site unless you want to read it below.
Basically, the site that hosts my game (Netlify) has automatically upgraded my account to a paid level because of the high amount of users on Larry Birdle.
This means that my previously free account with them now owes over $150 per month. I tried putting advertisements on my site, but they were too intrusive for the users, so I removed them until I found ones that didn't completely ruin the experience of the game.
Any donation from $1 to $5 is extremely helpful and will help Larry Birdle stay online for users for free!
My Story:
I am a second-year computer engineering student at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada. My classes had just gone back to in-person when my housemates and I tested positive for COVID. We spent most of our time in isolation watching TV and playing games on our phones, and I heard of this NBA wordle game called Poeltl. We all loved playing it each morning when it refreshed, but with my experience in web development, I realized it would be pretty simple to recreate. So I spent one morning working on the site and emerged from my room after 4 hours with a working game, free for me to host for up to 125,000 server requests/month. My older brother told me to post the game on Reddit, and after a few days, I had a considerable amount of users. After about a week or two, my site hit 400,000 server requests, and Netlify upgraded my account to a $25/month per site plan to get up to 2,000,000 requests per month. I thought it would be a good idea to make three backup websites to handle the server requests spread out with the main site, but Larry Birdle became so popular that those pages also went past the 125,000 free request limit! So as of April 2, I owe $25 on each of the four sites, and the main site is about to pass the 2,000,000 request threshold and make me owe A LOT more money.
While I am so grateful for the attention my site has gotten, the high amount of traffic is costing me more than I can earn!
Thanks for reading.
Organizer
Jacob Tepperman
Organizer
Toronto, ON