How to get funding for my project?

I have two projects that I think have potential, I have done my research and there isn't anything like that on the market as of now. I have spoken to a few people who might be end users of the products and they are really excited about it.

I am currently working on only one project as I feel that is the easiest to get out the door and start generating interest.

I am the only person working on it and development is not my core skill so I have had to hire a freelancer for the development but he didn't do a satisfactory job.

Till now I have used funds from my savings to pay for the development of the ideas but now I am running low.

I thought about crowd funding but all the crow funding sites require me to offer somekind of incentive and this has me stumped.

The project i am working on is community oriented, totally free to use and I intend to keep it impartial by not siding with any of the major players related to the product and hence there really isn't any incentive I can provide other than mentioning their names on the products thank you page.

I was wondering if people out here could provide some suggestions or some direction.

Based on your description, you really do seem to have painted yourself into a corner. I honestly think your biggest problem is that you're trying to build a product that costs money (or time or both) to create, and you've basically decided that you don't plan on making money off of it, even though it provides real value. I think what you really need to do is figure out a way to actually make money off of it, and then use traditional crowdfunding model and give people the product through it.

But since that's not really what you're asking, here are a few ideas that come to my mind that could help you jump start this.

1. Give them the advantage of an ad-free experience. Create two categories of accounts, one that's free, and one that's paid-for. Free accounts get shown ads. Paid accounts don't. Anybody who contributes through crowdfunding automatically gets the paid account for free (for life?). Even after you launch, people could still buy their account and get this benefit.

2. Give them some sort of extra features on the top. It doesn't necessarily even have to be much. Sometimes, people are such big fans of a product, that getting the "special edition" version of it is worth paying a bit of money for it.

3. Give them something related, but not the product. I participated in a Stack Overflow survey once because they gave me free Stack Overflow stickers. It was silly, but it convinced me to jump in and help (with time, not money). There's probably some sort of peripheral prize you could give instead.

4. Give them access to development versions. This one, I'm not sold on myself, because you're asking them to pay money to get not-yet-fully-functional software, when they could just wait, pay nothing, and get working software. In some ways, they're doing you a favor by using beta (or alpha) software. It may not be good to try to charge them for that. But I've seen projects do this, so it may not be as bad as it appears to me.

These ideas are all essentially along the lines of find something beyond what you were originally planning that people would be willing to pay for. I really think that's probably the best direction to go, but even if these ideas don't work for you, hopefully the get your mind going.

Your alternative may be to open source the project and see if you can get development help that way.

If crowdfunding is not possible and VCs or banks will not give you money because the idea poses no really solid returns, then you only have 1 option:

Learn to code on your spare time and then build the app yourself. Use the extra money from your day job to finance hosting, etc. of the app.

If the project is small enough, you should be developing it yourself. Any talented developer will not price themselves at $10-15 an hour and you can expect to pay a talented developer at least $30+ an hour (even in places where $30 is a lot of money, the most talented developers know that they can deliver, so they will price around the same amount as the US/Europeans).

There are also many 'tools' that make developing apps much easier (some are literally drag and drop) so if your app is simple enough, you can build it through those platforms.

I did mention above that there is only "1 option". However, there is also the option of getting finance and backing from friends and family, but based on the description of what you're trying to do, I would bootstrap this on my own with my own financing.