Sorry for the delay in responses, and if I missed anyone.
Which I wholeheartedly support! Goodness knows the number of devs I've dealt with in private for little things over the years, most of which never the light of day other than my own meanderings.
I still not sure though the attractiveness of what you're working on.
Is there a time limit being set for the funding? eg: "We need X people to commit to funding within Y weeks/months." or does it just go on forever? If after an amount of time not enough people join the pool for funding, and assuming nobody wants to buy additional votes, can those purchased votes be re-assigned to a different pool? Once the funding has been met is there a committed time window in which the funded item will be done? eg: "After the item is fully funded this change will be delivered in X weeks/months" or is it non-committal?
Sorry if those questions have already been addressed, I don't recall seeing the answers to them. I have no issues at all with what you're trying to do, I'm just trying to gauge whether or not participation as a 'funder' will ultimately result in action of some type.
We appreciate your support,
@Kevin . Sorry for missing this response, and your post makes a lot of sense. My only issue is how we would build an add-on that would do this for you. Essentially automate payouts and stuff if you wanted the money back in your account. I dont know if that can be easily done.
Okay I wasn't aware of it addressing smaller feature extensions. But that's also not a big problem. You could categorize very clearly what a new feature costs and how many have to pay what. So for example: A "basic" feature costs 10.- USD and you will need 5 people to fund it. Meaning two can fund it for 25.- each and get their feature. Or 50 with 1 dollar. Or 1 with 50 dollar. The numbers are for example only. But it is a transparent way and customers can calculate the chances.
A good point, one we implemented today. You can now see at what percentage the idea is funded at.
Also, for your protection don't accept PP for something like this or you will end up funding the ideas yourself lol.
Well, we do plan on supporting other systems, but a stolen credit card is a stolen credit card. Comes with the business, one we understand.
Hopefully Mike & crew can work out the details as to how exactly the funding will work. I give them credit as they are trying something new in the community and I'm more than willing to donate to ideas that I like, especially for small stuff that a dev can knock out, but at the moment there are lingering questions that need to be resolved.
Agreed and thank you. Will do our best to figure it out.
Also, say I come up with an idea and fund it entirely myself. Do I own the product I commissioned or does TH?
Can we have an idea thread here, I'm very lazy and don't want to register elsewhere.
An idea thread here is a great idea, there are tons of developers that need the work. We are booked up and so this was our way to trying to pay attention to those smaller communities that still need work done.
In response to who owns the product, I guess it would depend on the terms. If you contacted us directly you could fund the feature and own resale rights to it. Our default price, specific to our company, is that we keep the rights to reuse code we write. So short answer is we would, unless you contacted us and funded it all yourself.
Good concept in theory. IMHO simple transparent solutions are always the best, which i cannot say that this is. KISS principle gets overlooked far too many times these days.
Not interested in participating myself- i can get simple modifications done myself for $30 via development parties rather than just waste it on a 'vote'. I wonder how many people would buy this to put the initial vote as its pretty much throwing a dart without knowing where the dart board is.
Good luck for the initiative. Hope it succeeds but have lots of reservations and would not be using this myself. Most good devs add new features for free to their paid software in consultation with the community that they support trying to make the addon consistently better which leads to greater demand. With this idea it seems like the the initial/original purchasers are relied upon to fund new features to making the product a more feature rich addon.
I appreciate the vote of confidence, I really do. We are just trying something new, and hopefully it will pan out. I am all ears to any suggestions.
What you should do is 1 token for $1. People can invest as many tokens as they like... Tokens must be bought in batches of $10 so you're not getting spammed by $1 payments on PayPal.
I agree on the $1 or at least cheaper. We were hoping for $10/$30, but then there are Paypal fees (30 cents per transaction, for example) and then there is also the fact that you'd need 100 people to perhaps fund something if everyone voted once. We figured each vote would matter more if it was a larger chunk of the total.
There are many devs who can perform simple development enhancements for that money. Heck ive had numerous full addons developed for less than that.
While this is true, its also true that different web developers charge different amounts. We are on the very far low end of a range that is about $80/hr to about $300/hr. Companies choose what they want to charge based on many factors. And again, freelancers will charge a lot less. We are not freelancers.
The idea of paying for votes is interesting, but it is too risky for me as a customer. It doesn't make sense to risk losing $30 for something I could have developed for $50 or $100. For larger projects, I'd want to see real passion about the project, not simply 'here's a customer suggestion that we'll build if we're paid to.' I'd want to know why you are the ones to make this happen and how you see the add-on growing in the future.
It's an interesting experiment though, and I'll be curious to see if it's a successful model.
I appreciate your opinion and understand your point of view. This solution is not for everyone. However, out of curiosity, would contribution price point would make sense for you per vote?
Even the big, big names can hardly charge much just because the average customer is a kid. We're talking 8-16 years old.
To be honest, a lot of our customers are quite young. We do not care at all what age you are, it is no more our business than anything else personal.
Is it worth it? Definitely not.
I love XenForo, I love forums. While I would agree, some of the slack we get sometimes is tough, we understand our customers want the best out of us and will push us. I get that. We are doing our best to offer that.
And best of all, I love what I do. So this job is substantially better in comparison.
Well you said it wasn't worth it? I mean I get what you are saying, its a love hate relationship
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XF is a market in forum software. If XF isn't paying you off enough, then you best expand a bit and deal with IPB, vBulletin and a few other names.
We love XenForo. We started out in IPB, and vB, but it was love at first sight with XenForo.
