from Hacker News

We need to talk about funding

by chris_overseas on 10/26/23, 8:55 PM with 60 comments

• by ummzokbro on 10/26/23, 11:09 PM

  Having the courage to talk about this frankly and show a little bit of data in support is very compelling.

  It has resulted in at least one new monthly contributor and hope others do the same.

  I wonder if the decline in donations has anything to do with Prusa refusing to properly support Octoprint in favor of their own half baked, awful competitors that are no doubt in furtherance of their quest for SaaS rent seeking (BambuLabs fear? jealousy?).

  The MK4 and XL are barely functional with Octoprint and Prusa has indicated they intend to keep them this way, as they did with the Mini. That's a large and growing market now not really supported by Octoprint.

  They instead want you to use Prusa Connect, their currently free farm management software that requires internet access and all of your data to manage your local network of machines. No doubt this goes non-free the second any momentum is achieved.

  I say 'want you to use' because their local network solution, PrusaLink, is a barely maintained skeleton of a project that replicates a tiny portion of Octoprint's functionality, poorly (4kb/s uploads! 27 char file name limits!), while missing many critical features, has no plugin support and many many bugs. No doubt the prioritization within Prusa is Cloud and not the local functionality you actually need and your machines are capable of.

  By reducing Octoprint functionality to the level of their own rudimentary offerings on their newest flagship printers they certainly make the case for using Octoprint far less compelling and paying for it even less so.

  Octofarm shutting down also probably didn't help things either.

• by mholt on 10/26/23, 10:54 PM

  If Gina is reading this, can I just say: wow! It's so cool that you've had hundreds of sponsors on GitHub (almost 1000!) and that's really exciting size for a user base!

  I see you're seeking corporate sponsors. Awesome -- I think this can offset a significant amount of your expenses and pave the way to sustainability. IME it is much easier to sign on a handful of business sponsors than it is to get hundreds or thousands of users to commit to a few dollars a month. Your ROI will likely be much higher.

  If you want to make it even easier for businesses to sponsor, can I suggest adding significantly higher tiers to your GitHub Sponsors offering? Most companies probably won't even pay attention to the other funding venues you list, but GitHub is likely already an approved vendor. Try to add a few tiers in the hundreds of dollars per month and the thousands of dollars per month.

  You're doing great with this initiative. An earnest yet professional SOS is not a bad thing to do when a project is in peril.

  For more inspiration, I hope this can help: https://matt.life/writing/the-asymmetry-of-open-source

• by tivert on 10/26/23, 10:38 PM

  I've recently learned a somewhat uncomfortable truth: pretty much every nonprofit needs to constantly be spending effort wrangling up funding or it will die. It's annoying and uncomfortable truth, but it's true. The money won't find its way into the door on its own.

• by ary on 10/26/23, 11:04 PM

  Why not sell licenses? Perhaps they could have nominal benefits that are low impact on the maintainer, like early access to various things? Maybe foosel doesn't want to run a business, but given the choice between doing what I love and avoiding some administrative overhead I think I'd always choose the former.

  I'm reminded of what happened to the creators of Dwarf Fortress and it's hard not to recommend some form of commercialization for projects that need financial support.

• by snapplebobapple on 10/27/23, 12:10 AM

  That was one of the better asks for cash i have seen. I didn't feel pressured to contribute but i know the situation and could choose to help if i knew what octoprint was and got value from it.

• by devwastaken on 10/27/23, 4:36 PM

  Corps and orgs are not designed to "donate" money through any of those services. Do they even support tax exemption? It's more paperwork and process to donate $20, so it doesn't happen. Octoprint needs to create a license for business/org use and expand on that as a feature like octoeverywhere does. It has to be easy. You can't expect donations, you have to build a product. It's just human nature.

• by m4rc3lv on 10/27/23, 1:11 PM

  I like her and I have donated some money in the past but I am running an old instance and have turned off updates. I don't need new features in OctoPrint. Maybe she should think about other ways of making money from it.

  Also I don't need Octoprint anymore (except for one older printer) since I all but one of my printers are now directly connected to Wifi.

• by wly_cdgr on 10/27/23, 8:11 AM

  I'm so tired of this passive aggressive guilt trip "my product is free but if you want me to keep providing it I need you to patreon me" "business" model. Charge! Non-optionally! I'll pay if you do that - not before.

• by lardo on 10/26/23, 11:33 PM

  I’m content with octoprint, but if I needed to start from scratch today I would go with Mainsail. Largely because it looks much nicer. I suspect I’m not the only one.

• by jongjong on 10/26/23, 11:00 PM

  Strange. This looks very much like the kind of open source project which should have no trouble monetizing itself. I can understand why projects that are geared towards corporations and VC-backed startups would struggle to find funding due to monopolization and anti-competitive forces but this one doesn't make sense. Does it mean everyone who doesn't work for a corporation and isn't engaged in the fiat monetary ponzi is broke and can't afford to support such projects or pay for add-ons?