Gratipay for contributing to Virtualmin

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#1 Fri, 10/13/2017 - 15:49
Joe
Joe's picture

Gratipay for contributing to Virtualmin

Howdy all,

We've been asked how to donate to support our open source projects many times over the years, and we've always been able to accept PayPal donations, but didn't really make that visible, as it didn't really let us keep up with donations in a transparent way. So, I signed us up for Gratipay and just got approved. Gratipay is a way to contribute to OSS and other community-oriented projects in a transparent way (everyone can see how much is being contributed). They have very good terms, and don't collect high fees like some of the similar tools out there.

We run a tight ship around here with an extremely small budget (I think most folks would be shocked by just how small, given the huge size of our user base and code base; but we all have to do other work to keep the bills paid and roofs over our heads), and every little bit helps. We'll set aside all Gratipay contributions for things that provide value for everyone, and specifically it will be focused on supporting Ilia in his UI/UX work, and to allow me to spend more time on community tools like the forums and docs and opening up more of our code repositories on GitHub. None of it will be used for Pro-only development.

The past couple years have been an experiment in opening up more. All new features, including several major ones, during that time have gone into both Pro and GPL at the same time, and some formerly Pro-only features have been merged into GPL. The theory was that increasing our GPL user base would increase our paying customer base more than having big differences between the two. That experiment is still ongoing and in many ways has been a success in that our user base has continued to grow a nice rate. But, realistically, even with a larger number of Pro users, we haven't replaced the revenue we gave up by lowering prices in 2016 (and a prior price drop before that). We may have to focus once again on differentiating features during 2018 to encourage more folks to become paying customers, but we are long-time OSS proponents and we always prefer Open Source development if we can find ways to do it sustainably and without going bankrupt.

So, if you find value in the work we do on Virtualmin GPL, Webmin, Cloudmin GPL, and Usermin, and you want all of us to be able to keep doing this work mostly full-time for the long haul, we'd certainly appreciate your contribution.

https://gratipay.com/Virtualmin/

Thanks!

Cheers,

Joe

Sun, 10/15/2017 - 07:24
adamjedgar

Build a paid whmcs alternative and sell nice themes for its frontend website/store...i would buy it!

I even have a spiffy name picked out ....wait for it.....Storemin ^_^

AJECreative is the home of $5 webhosting, $15/month VPS servers (1cpu,1gb RAM, 25GB storage)
Centos7, Debian9, or Ubuntu18LTS
Available Control Panels = Centos-Webpanel, Cyberpanel, or Virtualmin

https://ajecreative.com.au

Mon, 10/16/2017 - 18:39 (Reply to #2)
Joe
Joe's picture

If I had the time, I would consider it. But, for now, we just don't have the personpower to tackle any major new projects. And, WHMCS is pretty darned good, according to most reports. It'd be tough to compete in the short term...it'd take us a couple of years to reach feature parity, I think, even if we had someone working full-time on the problem.

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Mon, 10/16/2017 - 05:56
noisemarine

Joe, I really appreciate the work you guys do. I logged in to Gratipay to have a look. Is there an option for once off payments? I only saw a weekly payments box.

Mon, 10/16/2017 - 18:36 (Reply to #4)
Joe
Joe's picture

I'm not entirely sure how Gratipay works, actually! But, one-off donations can also still be made via PayPal. I used to have a donate button somewhere around here...lemme see if I can dig it up and repaste.

Here it is:





Any contributions are greatly appreciated. We also encourage folks to donate to Ilia (it's where most of our donations are going to go anyway) for his work on Authentic Theme. (The new SPA version that's in beta is so freakin' fast, it's amazing.)

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Tue, 12/26/2017 - 03:16
jimefaw

Uh-oh: Gratipay is shutting down. Their front page seem to give recommendations for other sites.

Tue, 12/26/2017 - 06:54
tpnsolutions
tpnsolutions's picture

Hi,

I did some searching around "Gratipay" and have been inspired. I'm thinking of building a simple Gratipay-style service myself. The concept itself doesn't seem overly complicated, and I figure I could develop a basic system over a weekend.

If you'd support the idea, and would like to see this project take form, please let me know.

Best Regards,
Peter Knowles | TPN Solutions
Email: pknowles@tpnsolutions.com | Skype: tpnassist
Wed, 12/27/2017 - 21:29
Joe
Joe's picture

Yeah, Gratipay was a very brief and unsuccessful experiment for us. I saw the announcement about it shutting down a couple days after we got approved. Oh, well. It didn't work for us, anyway.

We'll just have to return to our focus on monetizing based on an "open core" sort of model, where additional features cost money. Voluntary donations just can't fund something as large/complex as Virtualmin (we're talking about mayb 700,000 lines of code or something absurd). I tried pushing more into GPL to grow the pool of users, but it hit our bottom line too hard even while increasing the user base by roughly 50% in two years (I haven't actually done a solid accounting yet, but last time I checked a couple weeks ago we had at least 150,000 active installations of Virtualmin, where we had 100,000 at the beginning of 2016 when this new experiment began. I think a lot of that growth can be attributed to Ilia's awesome theme work, as well, though. It could actually be more than that, as that's just the numbers from one download mirror. So, usage is through the roof which is awesome, but we still gotta keep the bills paid somehow.

Anyway, I think we just can't realistically expect donations to fill our funding gap. There may be other ways to go about it, and I might try Patreon or one of the other free software oriented ones, but I think we have to embrace the competitive commercial nature of the hosting business...people want to spend as little as possible to maximize the thin margins on selling hosting-related services, so getting folks to pay for something they don't have to is really difficult.

We may try a plugin-oriented sales model in 2018, as well, where folks can buy some Pro-only features (like Install Scripts) for Virtualmin GPL in an ad hoc fashion. We'll see (we need a better shopping cart situation for that, though, I think).

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Wed, 12/27/2017 - 21:51 (Reply to #8)
tpnsolutions
tpnsolutions's picture

Hi,

I've just sent you a revised proposal. Please read and let me know what you think.

Best Regards,
Peter Knowles | TPN Solutions
Email: pknowles@tpnsolutions.com | Skype: tpnassist
Wed, 12/27/2017 - 23:27 (Reply to #9)
Joe
Joe's picture

Will do, I'm still catching up on email.

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