Property-bee.com relies on donatations from its users to pay for the hosting of the site on a dedicated server, which costs £100 each month and allow users to share information with each other.
The people who run and develop property-bee.com give their time for free and are unpaid. If you have used the toolbar over the last 6 months, or like what we do, please consider donating a few pounds to help pay the hosting costs.
Thanks.
ps. I’m afriad we can only accept donations via paypal.
walks past quickly and pretends not to notice
For anyone think of buying a house in the next 2 years. The bee could potenially save you thousands.
+1, it’s a very nifty piece of work. It was (and continues to be) invaluable for rent negotiations, most notably for catching the signature ‘asking price increase in anticipation of haggling’ manoeuvre.
You caught me in a good mood. Normally I use these things and think to myself: “sure they’ll get what they need”. Sent them 20 quid. I shudder to think what Paypal will help themselves to, after raping me of 3p on the euro in their conversion rate.
I also just gave a colleague a few quid to starve herself for 24 hours. There’s an idea, the bee-keepers could promise to starve themselves for 24 hours to encourage donations. Or maybe commit to a 24-hour marathon of “Location, Location, Location”, limited to re-runs from boom times.
done.
worth it for BR’s news-finding services as much as anything else.
keep up the good work.
I am Delighted to help with a small donation
its a good site and a great resource, more than happy to throw then a few euro
well worth it - tenner donated
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£100 a month? What kind of server do they need? Seriously.
So, while you still know everything, How do you propose that the service could be at a lower cost?
I will be honest and say I wont donate. This site has passed its sell by date. Its an echo chamber for anti landlords and smug so and sos. I will probably be banned now anyway!
Clearly you have not used the toolbar, or have no idea of the scale of the project. The basic package won’t cut it.
Property bee property-bee.com is a toolbar that runs on Firefox, this scrapes the current price data for a property, sends this to a server, the server responds with the history, the toolbar works with daft.ie and most uk property sites.
Without tools like this we are at the mercy of estate agents, as their knowledge of the marketplace is part of their power, as I plan to buy next year I am happy to contribute to the annual £580 server hosting costs.
Property Bee was very useful to me when searching for an apartment a couple of years ago, so I am happy to make a contribution.
My apologies as to mix up of sites. Will look up Property bee and perhaps contribute. I have made the case for Landlords but trust me there are too many chips on their shoulders types here to wade through. I would estimate there are less than five landlord members on this site. Have a good evening.
I have used it, and I think it is fantastic. However, the hosting costs seem somewhat out of line with what I’d expect, while obviously knowing none of the figures behind the scenes. I would assume, first of all, that this is only used by geeks (I tried to get my sister to use it when she was buying a house in London and she couldn’t), second of all that your local database is only synced up with the remote one irregularly, meaning it is only an extra few HTTP requests per day if you are making the same search each time you use it.
The cost seemed high enough to me to suggest that they were asking users to subsidise development, rather than pay for hosting. I would have no problem with either, it just seemed somewhat disingenuous.
Looks like the revamped daft.ie has killed off at least the latest version of property bee anyway (unless it’s just my computer).
Edit: You have to click into the individual property to see the property bee stuff. You don’t get the synopsis on the results page anymore.
Just seen this thread…
Many thanks to to those the did donate, at least we known our hosting costs are covered for the next 9 months or so.
They maybe cheaper, but 15Gb HDD wouldn’t even hold the live database, let alone the site/forum/dev database/backups before archiving… even with the Enterprise version it would be a serious squeeze on HDD/RAM/grunt.
Some figures;
Seriously!
Oh and none of the donations go to development costs, in fact I’ve paid the shortfall on occasions from the little ad revenue the site generates.
In fact I worked out what I’ve earnt from ads on the site over 4 years… works out about 25p for each hour worked 