You are right, this is a business and our goal is obviously to make money from it, but we never intended to make that money from the network fees. Now that we made our system much more efficient and we pay very little in transaction fees ourselves, we believe there is no point to charge the users the same as before. That would only result in less usage and we do not want that.

Pretty much everyone that used the service after we made the fees optional decided to donate something, so as long as this continues we should generate more than enough to be highly profitable, especially with the increased usage that we expect after the above features are implemented.

Of course it could also happen that usage increases, but everyone will donate 0 and in that case we will have to implement a minimum fee again, but we doubt that will be the case. And as we said before we will run the platform with 0 fees for at least 3 months before deciding if it is in fact viable or not.

We have a big enough reserve that allows us to absorb losses without being under pressure while we improve the product to a point where it doesen't make sense to use another service instead of Whirlwind, that was the plan from the beginning.

We are aware of the clearnet issues, it's still under DDoS. It will be fixed once the major update goes live in a few days, we gave more details in the previous 2 messages. Until then the onion site should work perfectly as it's completely separate from clearnet.