Coming Soon: One-click, hosted Ushahidi

At Ushahidi we believe that no one should have to start from scratch when it comes to crowdsourced mapping, data collection and data management. We believe in open source software, which is why we provide most of our software for free. Our partnerships with world class foundations like Omidyar Network, MacArthur, Knight, Rockfeller, Ford and Google.org have helped us serve thousands of grassroots organizations and small non-profits that would never have had access to our technology. But as is normal, our grants last 3-5 years and include commitments to increasing earned revenue through our product offerings.

As part of our business development and sustainability strategy, Ushahidi takes on contracts and constitutes teams to work on projects. But moving developers off the platform has slowed our releases. At the same time we’ve also seen more for-profit and large NGOs that can afford to use our platforms and ask for more complex features and support that they are willing to pay for.

In response to this later this fall we’ll be launching a cloud-hosted Ushahidi with both free and paid tiers. We believe offering paid tiers of our core platform will help all users. We will be able to keep our developers focused on the things our users need to make an impact. And though we will be asking some people to pay for higher - tier versions, grassroots organizations and small NGOs will have access to Ushahidi Cloud version for free.

We are still a non-profit open source software company. All our code is free and open source and on Github for anyone to use and contribute to. And we maintain our commitment to build software that serves our core do-good-in-the-world communities of crisis response, human rights, and citizen & government interaction.

If you have questions and ideas about how we can stay aligned to our users, mission and evolve more sustainably, please feel free to email us directly at strategy (at) ushahidi (dot) com. We want to hear from you.