Sorry about this. The amount of engineering required is pretty high for making downgrade work, and we’re a small team. With limited time for new work, we end up prioritizing new features over making downgrade easy. (I’ll be honest, it’s always bothered us that downgrade isn’t self-serve.)
I’ll chat with the team and see if we can prioritize a long term solution (we just recently had new ideas for how to do this more simply). In the meantime, we might be able to figure something out for you. Feel free to hit me up directly if you need.
As I said below in a different comment: just remove the false claims from the free plan and we’re all good. Nobody expects you to deliver value for free which you don’t want to or cannot deliver.
73 million sites comes from our friends at Meanpath (their search engine isn't running anymore, sadly). They showed us on 7.3% of websites. Best guess is there are about a billion sites on the internet. Thus, 73 million.
Where did the 1000/visitors/site/day come from? This is what seems unlikely and improbable. This resource is being cached as well, so these numbers do seem obtuse.
Not sure on the 1000/visitors/site/day. But we're also on some pretty big sites as well. IIRC, the final number there is higher than what MaxCDN (BootstrapCDN folks) serves. Not by much though. Within an order of magnitude I think (which is pretty accurate for this kind of guesswork).
Of those 73 million, how many of them are serving the file themselves, vs pointing to it hosted by someone else? I know you can just point to google directly for their fonts, or unpkg.com for js packages. Is that something people also do for font awesome? Those shared links would greatly increase the cache level, and reduce the number of cache misses, and amount of data served.
According to Netcraft [0] there are currently 171,432,273 active websites. However there were 1,436,724,046 host names on the net. A total of 6,225,374 web-facing computers was reported.
Interestingly the number of active sites hasn't materially changed in 5 years, but host names have skyrocketed.
This is a great article. Some of these are already on the agenda for FA5, but there's some new stuff there for us too. We'll dig in and it's a TODO on the FA5 roadmap now. :)
Another thing I'm super excited about is stray points in vectors. We found some new tools for Illustrator that make this a LOT easier and will have a very real impact on bandwidth as well.
(Oh and FA5 Pro CDN will allow loading just the icon categories you need. And for real granular control, FA5 Pro includes a desktop subsetter for all backers too.)
Hey, glad you liked it! I tried to get in touch but I guess the message got lost in your noisy inboxes — must be a busy time for you folks. Ping me if there's anything I can help with!
I like and use font-awesome. Thanks and keep up the awesome work. Are there advantages to Wenting Zhang's [approach](http://cssicon.space)? Is there any way of lazy-loading - i.e. just accepting that some people - either through ignorance or laziness will load the entire set - and only use a couple of icons? Even if this were just some tool to craft the url it might get us on the road to that petabytes per day (really?).
Yeah, it shouldn't be confusing! We extended early backer pricing for the whole Kickstarter, so the Personal / SMB license would have been $40.
Only difference is who can use the license. Student license is for students only. But I'm recommending students just get the full Personal / SMB license since it's more flexible in the end and a better price.
(Non-profits should ABSOLUTELY get the Student / NP license as it's good for any organization size and just $20).
That's another one of the big things. We didn't talk about this one specifically, as it's not as common for folks to have. 1.5M uniques a month has come in handy, that's for sure.
We tried doing some Facebook advertising ourselves, but it didn't go so well. Jellop has done better, but they're REALLY great for products that have mass appeal.
With our narrower audience, the Font Awesome website has been the biggest driver.
Same. We just failed big time on running our own ads for pre-orders for our product[0] on Facebook.
Our take away was just keep doing what works: Engage with our community and keep showing proof of progress and milestones met.
So now that we have our first basic lesson down in connecting products to the right audience, what do you think really activated the majority of purchases?
I’ll chat with the team and see if we can prioritize a long term solution (we just recently had new ideas for how to do this more simply). In the meantime, we might be able to figure something out for you. Feel free to hit me up directly if you need.