Looking back at the email chain, they initially proposed donating $300/month as a gesture of appreciation and to share some of the costs, while asking us to whitelist their bot and essentially accept that they wouldn't display our credit banners on every chapter. We said that amount wasn't enough to offset the costs of scraping at scale, and that we weren't interested in effectively granting those concessions in exchange for a monthly donation.
They later sent $1,000 anyway, explicitly saying it wasn't conditional on us whitelisting their bot. We thanked them, but made it clear that we didn't want there to be any monetary obligation either way.
So yes, they did donate, and I appreciate the gesture. But no, I wouldn't say they covered a month's running costs based on the emails. Our server costs were in the thousands per month, and neither the $1,000 donation nor the $300 in the other email thread from February were presented or accepted as payment for a month's expenses or as an agreement to allow scraping.
I typically don't like sharing private email chains, but given the situation, I think it's better to let people judge the context for themselves rather than rely on anyone's recollection or biases. The original email chain is the best source for that.
After reading all the emails, there's just... so much going on here
Hilarious that they tried to scold Kagane devs for trying to block scrapers, a "cat and mouse game", only for them to do the same with third party apps. Truly. Especially when they've repeatedly broken their own website for their "real users" to do it and have blocked their own readers the same way lmao
They're aware that they could build their own tools/systems to get official chapters, even with AI, yet won't because they don't have time. It's not really a race and, still, the money Kagane would "save" would still be too little to be worth the trouble. The money Comix would "waste" to buy proxies to get content could've been put to buying the chapters themselves. If they were smart, they would've bought official chapters from platforms that Kagane doesn't currently have a lot of content from to make their site more attractive. Stuff like Mangaplaza, Coolmic and Renta- and that's if we're only talking manga. Kagane currently has 76 series from these platforms so that would've been an easy selling point for them
For some (hopefully correct) math, $300 a month out of $2800 is just barely above 10% of the monthly costs to run the site. Even if Kagane devs agreed to that, they're still footing most of the bill. So $300/$2800 a month for 12 months would be $3600/$33,600 which is still Comix paying just above 10% of the server costs for Kagane for the year. Not really a deal or "sharing the bill" to run Kagane. And, surely, the devs wouldn't want them to scrape the site so hard that users here got blocked and the devs had to do a whole server migration
They complain about competitors removing their credits page from the chapters, chapters they scraped from elsewhere, yet they planned to do the same thing for the chapters they scraped from Kagane and other scan groups that they got their chapters from. A listing on the credits page, that's linked at the bottom of the website that surely the users don't see or care about, is barely any compensation :/
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https://www.reddit.com/r/mangapiracy/comments/1x5mxb4/comment/pgvvv7y
This true? Did they donate enough to atleast cover one months cost?