Donations patreon paid support etc

[shawn_a]

Was wondering what the communities thoughts on a paid tier of support or a patreon or other donation system. If i could get paid i would be able to guarantee continued support and take over web hosting and development. I would also be able to consistantly create extensions and plugins and high quality documentation and guides.

Thoughts?

[adam_f]

Hey Shawn,I work for Patreon and would be happy to connect you with someone on our team who talks to and works with creators every day to answer your questions. We do have several creators on the platform who are developers using support from their fans to fund their ongoing development efforts. Let me know if you want to chat more.  

[shawn_a]

so no opinions ... interesting.

[lokothodida]

I'm not sure if it's people having no opinions, but worry over voicing them.

By far, you've contributed the most to GetSimple since 2012. You are the lead developer. But Chris was the initial creator, and it has been sustained since as a team effort. It might sour some people to know that only one person is being paid to support it, when there have been other passionate core team members involved in the last four years.

Maybe get the thoughts of the other core developers first? A patreon is still a very good idea, and given that there are people who profit off of GetSimple, those continuing to do substantial work on the core software deserve to be compensated for their time and effort. But if I were to contribute financially, I'd feel much more comfortable doing so knowing that Chris, Mike Swan, Connie, etc... gave their blessing.

[datiswous]

I think it could be interesting. I don't know exactly how a Patron system works, but if you could specify certain goals with funding attached to them, that would be useful.

It might be that people aren't willing to pay for it (and so they don't comment). Since we are an open source and free project, it means it attracts certain users. Also because GS is usually used for small projects (could be wrong).

I think maybe you should improve on the question description and who are you asking.

[Charpy1]

No problem for me, as long as GS stay fully free and open-source... I will happily suscribe to a montly fee for donation, but it's important that most of (all?) the money get to the GS team, so direct donation is better. All donation platform take some cash on the way so if we can go straight it's better!

[shawn_a]

hmm maybe i should rephrase that.

An OPTIONAL paid tier, or donation structure. Patreon is just an example , there are things like bounties systems, paid feature development bounties, etc.

Paid access for extended forums, or no forums at all and some other form of support.

This is not a question about taking payments personally ( i already have donate buttons on my personal website ) as opposed to other team members.

FYI to clarify, there are no other active team members involved in daily operation of GS and development besides me, I also do most of the administration of the forum with help of a few moderators.

GS has to stay free and open source, that is its license, of course I could fork it and do what whatever i want with it, but it still has to remain open source no matter what.

Things that are up in the air are.

Website
Community forum
Extend
SVN
Hosting

These things cost money and require a ton of maintenance.

[lokothodida]

I'm not sure about a tier system for support, but a donation structure to contribute to server uptime (for your points on Website, Forum, Extend and Hosting) sounds pretty reasonable. So do the paid development bounties. They all have a clear indication of what a person's financial contribution is doing.

[datiswous]

Just curious, how is the hosting being paid at this moment?

[shawn_a]

Chris is still hosting it for us, and the current donations go directly to him, but are not anything close to covering hosting, we are leeching off his personal account. Same goes for the buysellads. I have not had the time or resources to look into moving it, or obtaining hosting.

Sponsored hosting is a thought, but comes with its own problems and probably more admin.

So I basically cannot take over GS without some kind of plan to get started. And I am not sure ad revenue is the way to go.

[hameau]

I haven't had time to put proper thoughts together, but I have been thinking about this since the original post.

I do think that more pressure should be put on those of us who profit from using GS in commercial projects. It isn't unreasonable to expect a donation when a commercial site goes live – but who gets the donation? I have previously sent donations to individuals, where I have used their plugins and it would have been difficult to make the site work without them (you can probably guess at least one or two of them). The advantage here is that those who are earning from it are directly supporting it.

Although it hasn't been specifically mentioned, I would hate to see GS becoming a two-tier CMS, so any extra level of support should be just that – something extra to what's provided here. Way back when I was looking for a CMS to standardise on for my applications, it was extremely annoying to be able to install the basic software, but be stuck with paying to try some of the features that I might need.

I can't see that ads are going to be viable in the future, so I agree with that.

Sponsored hosting may not be a bad idea, provided the sponsor doesn't expect any hands-on admin access. =O

[shawn_a]

Yeah i wonder if there is any mechanism for paid plugins for oss projects.
Any tiering would be support only or perhaps a hosting and maintanence or upgrade service for commercial but i doubt it would ever be anything like that.

[HelgeSverre]

I am very willing to support the project through a monthly solution like Patreon.

Something that might be interesting to look into in the future is the ability to put your plugins/themes out on extend for a price (1-20usd), this might be an incentive for developers and themers to provide us with more high quality plugins and themes.

Especially themes, GS is very lacking in this regard in my opinion.

What kind of hosting requirements does the GetSimple site have at the moment?
Is it enough to throw it on a DO droplet? I have quite a lot of credits floating around not being used if you would be interested in that.

[shawn_a]

I would want a hosted solution for that, certainly do not want to engineer my own plugin store.
ala codecanyon etc.

I would love to get rid of forums, and go with a cloud community, there are some really good ones, vanilla etc, but they are at min $100 a month so unless i find an alternative those are not really reasonable.

Moving wiki and pages to github would be nice.

[The_Shopkeeper]

Sorry for resurrecting an old thread, but i'd like to make a donation (beer money) to tell show Shawn_a and others that their work is greatly appreciated. 

Is there an agreed mechanism for showing support?

Happy New Year to you all.

[shawn_a]

I have paypal on my personal site

Gs has a donation that goes to chris for website hosting etc

[The_Shopkeeper]

I have paypal on my personal site

Gs has a donation that goes to chris for website hosting etc

Great - I made a donation to Gs last year - so I've sent a little donation to you.
Sorry it's not much but cheers and thank you.

[shawn_a]

appreciated

[The_Shopkeeper]

Thanks Shawn, for another year of hard work and support on these forums.
I've sent you a donation to have a beer on me.
Again, not much, but the thought is there. 

[shawn_a]

Thank you!