Happy new year!
This early note just to let you know that professional paid support services will pause until roughly mid January 2023. From then on it is first-come-first-served for paying users and no intention of professional support at all for free-riders.
I hope it will be a better business year for PTB than the last poor year 2022, or the year 2021 before.
Our learning from these years of trying to get our users to contribute something voluntarily so far is that over 99% of our users apparently don’t care about having high quality tools developed and maintained in a sustainable fashion. And it is definitely not due to lack of awareness, as over 1600 people alone read the relevant announcements on this forum, or watched Celia’s VSS 2022 talk from last May or saw Twitter announcements, not counting mailing list announcements and reads at all, or many thousands of PTB downloads with such announcements included.
It’s also apparently not a matter of price. Our year 2022 99,- Euro special christmas discount offer was taken up by only about 20 people in total. We needed at least 16 contributions just to break even at the new discounted price point, so this was barely a noteworthy improvement. Last year a whopping total of 8 labs contributed at christmas time, down from the starting year with 36 labs contributing.
The required amount of sales to make Psychtoolbox development and maintenance long-term sustainable at this price point is measured in thousands of licenses, not in units of ten.
A big thank you to the tiny minority of people with long-term thinking ability, which supported us voluntarily in those years, you rock!
We will keep the 99 Euro offer a while longer into the new year, in case some labs couldn’t contribute money late last year anymore and have new funding to spend with the start of the new year, iow. if this was just again unlucky timing. However I’m not hopeful anymore that any voluntary “carrot” method of getting our users to contribute to the common good of their chosen field of work will work. But hope dies last. I’m out of win-win “carrot” ideas.
Have a good start into 2023,
-mario