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- LocalSend Quietly Nailed Donation UX To Get More Sponsorship Money
LocalSend Quietly Nailed Donation UX To Get More Sponsorship Money
PLUS: Anthropic's MCP Server + API Release Means in 9 Months Everything Will Change
Startup Spells 🪄
May 23, 2025
LocalSend Quietly Nailed Donation UX To Get More Sponsorship Money
LocalSend, the open-source, cross-platform alternative to Apple's AirDrop, recently made a small but smart product decision: it added a visible sponsor section to the bottom-left of its interface.
Now, as you browse the site, you see real-time updates with donor names, amounts, and short messages.
LocalSend Sponsor
It’s not flashy, and it doesn’t interrupt—but it works.
This sponsorship section wasn’t always there. A Wayback Machine snapshot from January 13, 2025 shows an earlier version of the site with no sponsor section at all.
LocalSend Sponsor - Old Version
Back then, like most open-source projects, donation options were likely tucked away on the about page or in the little footer—out of sight, out of mind.
By making support visible and ambient, LocalSend has quietly shifted how it frames community funding. It’s not begging for money. It’s not pushing banners in your face like Wikipedia or Internet Archive.
Web Archive's Sponsor
It’s just showing that people care—names, dollars, real contributions—right there in the interface.
That subtle visibility does more than any pop-up. It normalizes support. It builds trust. And for open-source tools looking to survive without ads or enterprise backing, this is the kind of UX decision that makes a difference to get support.
Top Tweets of the day
1/
Just tested Sonnet 4
One prompt:
Claude Sonnet 3.7 (1 screen)
vs
Claude Sonnet 4 (5 screens & interactive)Result:
— Nick (@nickbakeddesign)
5:26 PM • May 22, 2025
Claude Sonnet 4 is definitely better than other models at UI. I got some pretty good one-shot UIs with it.
2/
One of the most surprising things about Claude 4 is how well it follows instructions. Sometimes almost too well.
Our web search prompt for Sonnet 3.7 was a mess. We had to repeat the same instructions over and over because the model would randomly ignore things. The prompt kept
— Alex Albert (@alexalbert__)
5:44 PM • May 22, 2025
The models have started to follow instructions well. If you have used models extensively before, you'd realize how badly it followed instructions.
It'd go off the rails after some context was added. Sometimes it wouldn't follow instructions. You can even see it now if you ask GPT-4o to get rid of em-dashes and it wouldn't.
Now that's fixed in Claude 4 atleast.
3/
Obsidian Bases + Obsidian Web Clipper is the web archival tool I always wanted
replaces my read-it-later app and saves everything to local markdown files
— kepano (@kepano)
7:38 PM • May 22, 2025
Pocket is dead. Never understood how it made any business sense. I've personally saved 1000+ articles on Pocket to read later but I never got around it.
I don't know what took them so long to shut it down. It might work as a standalone bootstrapped app like Instapaper or one-time fee or a Planet Fitness model but better businesses exist.
Rabbit Holes
(MAY 22ND) BREAKING: Anthropic's MCP Server + API Release Means in 9 Months Everything Will Change by Jordan Crawford (Blueprint)
We helped a SaaS company go from $80k MRR to $340k MRR in 14 months - here's what we actually did by /r/startups
Claude 4 prompt engineering best practices by Anthropic
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