Just going to spitball this one, if you don't mind. Feel free to take or ignore any of this as you see fit.

• Sponsorship could go well, and if you're worried about low-quality sponsors simply decline anyone who doesn't met your set standards (it helps to have those standards outlined somewhere too).

• If you haven't yet, consider publishing a book with the best designs and possibly reach-out to the designers/teams to provide insights into their process/reasoning. That type of book could do well (just look to "Web Designers Idea Book" for an example of what's possible).

• Paid memberships could be an option too. I'd pay $5/mo if it meant I got insight news and interviews with the top developers/designers behind some of these apps. Even offering members something like the ability to vote on designs (exclusive to members only) and all of that could be worthwhile. $5 is chump change for many people in your market.

• Start outlining best practices as seen in this apps. Obviously you're looking at all of the shots that come in (right?) so you've got to start seeing a lot of unique trends, etc. You could easily collect insights you've seen and create an ebook/guide with those insights, sell it for $15 and you could easily recoup your $2k costs (you'd have to sell just 133 copies).

• Become an Amazon Affiliate. Depending on how much traffic the site gets (and whether you have an email list or dedicated RSS following), Affiliate links can build up revenue really fast. I just started implementing more affiliate links on my own blog and with 100,000 subscribers that's led to some months where my affiliate check covers my (very expensive) rent. You could easily sell design-oriented books and tools, etc. with your audience.

• If you have any spare time, consider making Pttrns into a consultancy. Again, if you're looking at and evaluating all of these designs, you likely have some valuable insights into how iOS designs can be done as well as how they should be done. Sell that as a service ($100/hr to start) and if it goes well after some time that could be your full-gig. Hell, I'd love to work with you to consult.

• Boost donation requests. Donations can work, if done right. The number one problem with donations (in my experience) is that most users don't realize it's an option (or that $5 really can go far). Stick a donation button everywhere you can, but do so intelligently and with clear indicators that "donations help this site going."

Good luck!

Robin, I saw that you are hosting on Heroku, Heroku is insanely expensive, you could switch to Digital Ocean or other hosts and reduce your costs.

Note: we have 1.5M pageviews/month on average and most of the visitors are designers.

Sponsorship seems like the best option for continuing to scale up. Working with larger sponsors rather than multiple smaller ones would be easier to manage.

One consideration, although I'm sure that it's not what you're looking to do, would be to scale down and make pttrns.com a paid only resource, with member paying $5 a month or something similar.

With 1.5m pageviews you could easily monetise the site assuming a $1.50 CPM and unlimited inventory to fill on the advertisers part. If you want a designer-y ad network, then I recommend The Deck. http://decknetwork.net/

Can't comment on hosting but it seems others have pointed you in the right direction.

On recouping costs my vote goes towards Sponsorship. Generally companies that would want to advertise towards Designers are design savvy companies, I don't think ugly ads would be much of an issue. Plus weekly sponsorship could put a little green in your pocket for your hard work.

I think ads could still be an option if you did some leg work and reached out to a few relevant companies - or to networks that specialize in design, etc. There are niche ad networks a lot of popular bloggers will take advantage of that pretty much ensures relevant, quality stuff that shows up. I might do a little digging on that.

http://decknetwork.net

http://fusionads.net

http://carbonads.net

Yadda... yadda...

Hey Robin - thanks for maintaining pttrns.com! It really is an invaluable resource.

I like the book idea the most. I'd pay a premium for tangible items that I could use as reference for years to come.

I would create somewhat of a flashcard set of screenshots and categorize them and package them in a fun case something like those Wildlife Treasury Cards of years past. You can do this pretty much yearly, but wouldn't really work well for iPad shots. This could also take the form factor of a pantone book.

This may not be a way to monetize, but I could also see a possible relationship with Offscreen Magazine . They cover the people behind the pixels, and you cover the pixels themselves. There's an opportunity to leverage their audience to offer something to offscreen subscribers or vice versa.

Once you're sure that you've cut down on excess costs ('liking' your hosting provider is a luxury you can no longer afford if you want this thing to be sustainable), you need to try and find a way to support the site which is in keeping with the editorial standards. To my mind - Fusion/Carbon/The Deck are all tasteful networks of ads which I think fit with your audience nicely, again - feeling that ads are anachronistic is a luxury you can't afford unless you have a better idea.

Here's one thing I know: Hiring iOS developers is hard work, and it costs a shit-load of money. You have a loyal, captive audience of mobile designers & developers - access to whom companies hiring these folks would likely be very willing to pay.

You could go about this a couple of ways:

1. A jobs board: You charge per post, or you come up with a creative referral system through which candidates successful hired via your site earn you a nice little bump (You could easily cover your costs here with one successful candidate per month - find out what a recruiter earns per candidate in this field, it'll blow your mind).

2. You approach companies you respect and ask if they'd like to be a 'featured employer'. If you have good traffic, good users and good content - employers will pay to be featured. Give them a month featured prominently on the site, sticking to the pttrns way of displaying apps, but with an inside-line from the company that uses the product to outline why a designer would want to go and work for them. The only stumbling block here is 'companies you respect', because being picky is a luxury you can't afford if you want this thing to be sustainable.

That's my spiel - employment is the angle, you can skin that any way you like, I think it has potential to pay your bills and then some if you get it right.

I think I should have mentioned as well that I plan to introduce a beta version of API. Perhaps this could be a way to get a few bucks in exchange for the content access.

Are you using s3 or anything else for images or other static assets? Reason I ask is that you might be able to reduce the amount of dynos from heroku and save money.

No doubt Heroku is killing you on the costs. I'm sure a ton of web hosting companies would love to host you for free or at a reduced rate for free ad space.

You could also potentially look into making a News Stand or mobile app to view the content on your site and charge for it. Although that might require quite a bit of work.

I also really like Tanner's idea of publishing a book.

I'd charge something between $25-30 bucks / year If you have about 1000 users and just wanna pay the bill. (but since you don't have login is hard to guess how many users).

Also for sure heroku is not the best option in this case. Digital Ocean works and is cheaper.

Hope u get enough donations to keep running.