Day 3 - How much does TallyJ cost?

It costs nothing.

Over the 10 years that TallyJ has been in use, it has always been free. And it still is!

What is it worth?

That's for you to decide. If your community has 30 voting adults, then you probably don't need it and shouldn't try to use it. However, if you have 700, or 2000, or more, adults voting, then using TallyJ is almost required and will save you many hours of counting! The effort required to learn it, and get computers ready at election time, will be amply rewarded by the surprise and gratitude from the community for how quickly the counting is done!

You are welcome to create an account, whether you expect to be a head teller or not, and make as many elections as you wish. In fact, I encourage you to make a few "test" elections, and practice using TallyJ! You can do that any time, like right now! Here's the web site: http://TallyJ.apphb.com.

What about hosting fees for the web site, and other costs?

So, far, I have been fortunate enough to use no-cost web sites, like FaceBook, to share information about TallyJ. The hosting location, called AppHarbor (hence the "apphb" in the web site address), is wonderful to use and is free for small applications. At the moment, TallyJ fits quite nicely. As more and more communities start to use TallyJ, I may have to "scale up" the web site to handle more people. When that happens, there will be a cost to running TallyJ. I don't have firm plans about what to do at that time, but I suspect that a few sponsors or occasional donations would be enough to cover those costs, likely under $100 per month.

The other challenge is to share the news about TallyJ with Baha'i communities that have not heard about it. I've used promotional $50 credits with both FaceBook and LinkedIn to make and run ads on those sites. In both cases, a number of people were able to learn about TallyJ, so I consider those ads successful! If you would like to help do more of that, please contact me with ideas! Also, if you know of a way of letting more Baha'is know about TallyJ, please help out by sharing what you can with them!

To me, success is measured by how many communities around the world are able to run their elections in the most efficient way possible. To that end, I've invested hundreds, if not thousands, of volunteer hours over the past 12+ years, and fully intend to continue doing so! If your community is able to make use of TallyJ, then my goal has been achieved!