Buy Nothing Turns 10
Thank you all so much for joining us over the past decade, for bringing Buy Nothing to life with us! We’ll never forget that first week, exactly a decade ago, when we set up our first Buy Nothing Project gift economy in our home town on Bainbridge Island, WA. Within hours, we had over a hundred members who were giddy, trying out new posts in our experiment asking friends and neighbors to buy less and share more. Within days, more communities asked for a Buy Nothing gift economy in their neighborhood. Since then, we’ve kept our eye on the possibility of building our own platform, to form-fit our vision of collaborative giving, sharing, asking, borrowing, lending to every community on Earth. We just got closer to that goal: Welcome to Buy Nothing 2.0!
Thank you all so much for joining us over the past decade, for bringing Buy Nothing to life with us! We’ll never forget that first week, exactly a decade ago, when we set up our first Buy Nothing Project gift economy in our home town on Bainbridge Island, WA. Within hours, we had over a hundred members who were giddy, trying out new posts in our experiment asking friends and neighbors to buy less and share more. Within days, more communities asked for a Buy Nothing gift economy in their neighborhood. Since then, we’ve kept our eye on the possibility of building our own platform, to form-fit our vision of collaborative giving, sharing, asking, borrowing, lending to every community on Earth. We just got closer to that goal: Welcome to Buy Nothing 2.0!
In this new version of the Buy Nothing app, 3 new welcome screens highlight what you can do: You Give, you Ask, you express your Gratitude, you put yourself in the center of your community with many options for adjusting your sharing radius, and you track your impact.
2.0 is for Everyone
We've been listening to feedback from current BuyNothing users, and we're proud to bring some of your top requested improvements to life with BuyNothing 2.0. Here’s CTO, Hugh Molotsi’s, roundup of the improvements we’ve added to 2.0:
We've been listening to feedback from current BuyNothing users, and we're proud to bring some of your top requested improvements to life with BuyNothing 2.0. Here’s CTO, Hugh Molotsi’s, roundup of the improvements we’ve added to 2.0:
- You can now use Buy Nothing 2.0 on an iPad or Android tablet
- Our Search function now matches strings of words with those same words in post description and matches neighbors’ names. We also highlight what matches
- You can now delete comments on your posts
- You can now update your Gift status from the Home feed (Pending Pickup, Gifted, Ask Fulfilled, etc.)
- You can now edit your posts from the Home feed
- We’ve fixed tons of bugs and performance issues
- We’ve added color to the Give/Ask/Gratitude Post Action box
- We’ve improved the app’s loading speed
Sustaining Members
We also present you with the option to become a Sustaining Member by subscribing for $6.99/month or $49.99/year. By subscribing to premium features in the app, on either a monthly or discounted annual basis, you help sustain Buy Nothing so we can continue to build out new features for everyone. When you’re a Sustaining Member, you have access to features built just for you and you’ll get a first chance to utilize features we’ll later roll out to everyone.
We’re starting with 2 Sustaining Member features (and we're putting the finishing touches on more). The first feature that's live now allows you to save multiple sharing locations (Buy Nothing at work, on vacation, or at your parents’ house, etc), making it very fast and easy to connect with all of the Buy Nothing communities you’re part of.
Our second feature is a status update for posts: You can mark your post as “Let it Simmer” to signal to your neighbors that you’ll choose a recipient after waiting to let more people throw their names into the proverbial hat, or you can mark your gift as a “Flash Give,” meaning you’d like to give it away immediately. These are already cultural norms within Buy Nothing communities and we know neighbors will love this easier way to mark gifts, to set expectations that benefit the givers and recipients alike.
We also present you with the option to become a Sustaining Member by subscribing for $6.99/month or $49.99/year. By subscribing to premium features in the app, on either a monthly or discounted annual basis, you help sustain Buy Nothing so we can continue to build out new features for everyone. When you’re a Sustaining Member, you have access to features built just for you and you’ll get a first chance to utilize features we’ll later roll out to everyone.
We’re starting with 2 Sustaining Member features (and we're putting the finishing touches on more). The first feature that's live now allows you to save multiple sharing locations (Buy Nothing at work, on vacation, or at your parents’ house, etc), making it very fast and easy to connect with all of the Buy Nothing communities you’re part of.
Our second feature is a status update for posts: You can mark your post as “Let it Simmer” to signal to your neighbors that you’ll choose a recipient after waiting to let more people throw their names into the proverbial hat, or you can mark your gift as a “Flash Give,” meaning you’d like to give it away immediately. These are already cultural norms within Buy Nothing communities and we know neighbors will love this easier way to mark gifts, to set expectations that benefit the givers and recipients alike.
Please test out our new features, enjoy the improved performance of the app, and consider becoming a Sustaining Member. You’ll recognize Sustaining Members in your community with this green leaf badge:
Thank you!
Our deep gratitude to each of you for your patience with the app. We created our build with contributions from friends and family and have had to deal with technical issues on further limited resources. The challenges are certainly not over, but with contributions from our Supporters and subscriptions from Sustaining Members, we’ll keep on making improvements for everyone.
Our deep gratitude to each of you for your patience with the app. We created our build with contributions from friends and family and have had to deal with technical issues on further limited resources. The challenges are certainly not over, but with contributions from our Supporters and subscriptions from Sustaining Members, we’ll keep on making improvements for everyone.