Mario posted that membership support was a financial failure and will be discontinued. First, it is a shame. Second, what can we do to support PTB at least? Is there something like a coffee kitty at the PTB core unit (Mario/Dee/Ingo)? Or formally: a non-profit PTB supporter group?
Greetings
Andreas
It wasn’t remotely as successful as it should have been, given the feedback and advice and promises of ~2000 neuroscientists over various in-person meetings, funding workshops and surveys, that this business model would be absolutely what they would support as soon as we implement it, sure thing! And not even remotely successful enough to keep PTB alive.
In a typical year it generates about 10.000 Euros of income, and at least 5.000 Euros of cost, and a lot of friction in my work, causing delays and interference for more important and potentially more profitable work. I am only one single person, having to do all the work from the mundane and simple to the really difficult, and multi-tasking between many mentally taxing and wildly different topics, on different operating systems, requiring reconfiguration of a very limited set of hardware, has enormous context switching overhead that reduces work efficiency.
So while profits after subtraction of costs may be ~5000 Euros in a lucky year, barely covering the operating costs of 1 month, at a ridiculously low salary, it does delay the completion and intake of critical work, and of way more financially profitable work, so in the end we lose more money than we make.
That said, the membership is not yet discontinued for the time being, and needed if one wants any non-trivial help from me. I just don’t think it is worth pitching it anymore, or trying to tweak it.
The “coffee kitty” light memberships for 25 Euros a year were an even bigger failure, as were donation runs. Just setting it up and maintaining it caused more costs and losses than it ever made. I think we sold a total of 3 of those for a total income of 60 Euros with costs for setup, maintenance and teardown in the hundreds of Euros.
We still have the swag shop running, with no maintenance going into it at all, not even updating the stickers with new year numbers, because that would be throwing good money after bad money… It still sells coffee cups, T-Shirts and stuff, with logos from 2020, not updated since 3 years. I think we sold a total of 1 coffee cup for 9,70 Euros or so… If somebody wants a a PTB themed something with outdated and not that attractive logo, maybe it will become a unique collectors item at some point, who knows?
As we are completely out of good and user friendly business ideas by now, and don’t believe in anything anymore that has the word “voluntary” in its description, we will very likely turn to things that force people to pay for the use of PTB, to the extent that this is even possible with FLOSS open-source software, without totally compromising my own goals and values for the project (aka turning to the dark side), and assuming the whole project doesn’t go belly up before we can even implement and try that last rescue attempt. But that’s for next year.
Recently I found this statement from discussions relating to other open-source software projects which drive substantial parts of the world and are under-resource and struggling, and I think it is perfectly consistent with close to 20 years of my experience in this field by now:
“It’s hard to make money in software by doing things to make peoples’ lives better or increase their freedom. It’s easy to make money with rent extraction schemes, addictionware, dark patterns, and outright scams. It’s like this market is full of people who want to be screwed and refuse to pay for anything that doesn’t screw them.”
This one fits most of my past work life even better:
“Find a job you enjoy, and you’ll never get paid a day in your life.”
-mario