Funding Ideas

S4-John

This topic was started on FOSSBilling GitHub Discussions, and was moved to this forum on 19/03/2023. Original post authors and dates are preserved.

evrifaessa - May 20, 2022

Donations and sponsorships through Open Collective (now open: https://opencollective.com/fossbilling)
Maybe advertisements in our main website (there seems to be great alternatives to Google Adsense. Such as EthicalAds by Read The Docs. The money would go to our Open Collective account, and we'd make sure to go with something that won't track our users, or don't place advertisements at all.

FOSSBilling is a free project, and will likely be free as long as it exists. We'll need a valid economical sustainibility plan. Let's discus this here, transparently.

BelleNottelling - May 20, 2022

Potentially further down the line, paid / priority support could provide some further income.

The big thing imo is keeping the entire project open source and free. If someone doesn't want to pay for it, I still want them to have full functionality.

evrifaessa - May 20, 2022

The big thing imo is keeping the entire project open source and free. If someone doesn't want to pay for it, I still want them to have full functionality

Absolutely. That's why we removed Pro from BoxBilling in the first place and I personally wouldn't want to have that back in the future.

jaapmarcus - May 20, 2022

Maybe advertisements in our main website (there seems to be great alternatives to Google Adsense. Such as EthicalAds by Read The Docs. The money would go to our Open Collective account, and we'd make sure to go with something that won't track our users, or don't place advertisements at all.

For the low traffic not worth the time to setup...

gOOvER - May 20, 2022

Paid Support for Buisness Customers 😉 They earn Money with the software and when they need help, they should pay 🙂 Or priority support

jaapmarcus - May 20, 2022

Paid Support for Buisness Customers 😉 They earn Money with the software and when they need help, they should pay 🙂 Or priority support

Every user is an "Buisness Customers" as it has no use in non comercial use...

notbasetwo - May 20, 2022

I think that sponsorships is definitely the way to go, and certainly the most realistic! For people who would like a specific feature - having it be prioritised by someone throwing some money at it is always a bonus.

Paid support would probably be an option once the product is in a much cleaner shape than it is now - I think at the moment it would be too much to ask for given the state of the project.

Advertising on the site would likely not be worth a huge ton, perhaps if there was a good chunk of informative content (i.e. tutorials, etc) - that could drive traffic & ad revenue.

John-S4 - May 23, 2022

Agree with @notbasetwo and @jaapmarcus that on site advertising is really not worth the effort unless you have a significant amount of traffic and a number of quality content articles to bring people in to the site. It's also pretty bloody annoying to most users and a lot of people who would be visiting a software project site will already be using browsers with ad blockers enabled.

Paid support is a nice idea, but only on the provision that there are people ready to provide that support who can do so quickly and solve most issues. Unless you have a support team in place to provide that then it feels like cheating people to be offering it.

+1 for Open Collective though.

jaapmarcus - May 24, 2022

Last option is off course software as an service...

haydenwalker980 - May 26, 2022

+1 for Open Collective. Just need to find a fiscal host.

evrifaessa - May 26, 2022

Our colective is already open and operating, we're now under Open Source Collective.

https://opencollective.com/fossbilling

John-S4 - May 29, 2022

As well as Open Collective we also now have GitHub Sponsors set up and approved.

You can find the Sponsor button at the top of the organisation page and also at the top of each repo.

weismannweb - Sep 30, 2022

Here is my idea...

For integrating with panels and vps providers and other provisioning providers.....I think we should provide only 5 core modules for the major ones. Then make the rest a paid api with a unified api interface like this does it for shopping carts https://api2cart.com/ WHY? because there's no way unless we get huge amount of free team members with lots of time can we can keep making connectors or keep up with the whmcs plugin marketplace. Thoughts?

weismannweb - Sep 30, 2022

FYI the community is still free to make modules and release them or to make them paid.

Also some other ideas:
developer certification
certifying modules
bounties
feature crowd funding (like someone said)

jaapmarcus - Sep 30, 2022

Here is my idea...

For integrating with panels and vps providers and other provisioning providers.....I think we should provide only 5 core modules for the major ones. Then make the rest a paid api with a unified api interface like this does it for shopping carts https://api2cart.com/ WHY? because there's no way unless we get huge amount of free team members with lots of time can we can keep making connectors or keep up with the whmcs plugin marketplace. Thoughts?

Idea is to make Fossbilling "Core" without any server connectors and make them all as plugin optionally so the main product becomes smaller.

But every module that we want to produce should be free and building an paid api is for me a no go.

weismannweb - Sep 30, 2022

ok noted

John-S4 - Sep 30, 2022

100% agree with @jaapmarcus - A paid API would be explicitly against the ideals and principles of the project.

weismannweb - Sep 30, 2022

yes, makes sense, i think maybe then just paid open source plugins as you guys already are heading, in fact it might be better, then ech dev can make plugins as they like and earn individually

jaapmarcus - Sep 30, 2022

Paid opensource plugins can't exists

Unless they are paid before hand and then opensourced...

weismannweb - Sep 30, 2022

well yeah calling them open source is wrong, but they have their source open yet they are commercial and its done by copyright on the trademark i think, also wordpress does it with GPL

evrifaessa - Sep 30, 2022

the software itself is open-source. they provide paid hosting and management under their name but the software is still open-sourced.

jaapmarcus - Sep 30, 2022

Yes but Wordpress is available as opensource and they sell services under the "Wordpress" brand but the code is still free and open available.

securehosting1 - Mar 8, 2023

Obviously, the big money maker would be to remove the branding for $2pm etc or with support $10-$50 pm.

securehosting1 - Mar 16, 2023

It would be very easy to simply copy OSSN style https://opensource-scoialnetwork.org they have opensource free then a separate site that sells a premium version and premium paid plugins/components.

Anuril

I'd like to propose a way of funding that's called "value for value". This model has been used by many content creators in the past. The idea is simple. Instead of asking for Donations, Users would be asked to contribute back to the project based on the value that they gain from the software.

In exchange, users would be listed in a "hall of fame" style page, for example, a special credits page on the website. There could also be a kind of "rank" system implemented, where the level of donation determines the visibility of the donor's contributions.

Often, Value for Value models adopt a "Theme", for example "the Knights of the round table" or "the pirates of skull island", and an associated rank system that's adhereing to that style.

There could be multiple ways to ask the user for a contributions. For example:
- Users can be asked to "Join the 123 Knights of the round table" on the Download page.
- On the Dashboard, there could be a Prompt like "Successful? Wonderful! Donate what FOSSBilling is worth to you, and joing the Knights of the round table"

I'm sure many of you will think of more and better ideas than I have 🙂

Best Regards,

Chris

BradBot_1

A revenue split seems best here as it would be passive however it needs to be better fleshed out in a manor that is more than I can offer.

Ideally ir would work like so:

In some payment providers a user can define either a percent or flat amount that is automatically forwarded to the project.
Once a user purchases something from the store the defined amount is redirected to a FOSSBilling account

Of course there are downsides:

If the forward address is changed on a modified panel there would be no way of knowing
For things such as Stripe or PayPal extracting the payment would be almost infeasible
Transaction fees would have to be paid twice

If these issues could be worked out it would be a very accessible way for donations to occur without requiring an upfront sum given up by the panel owner

BelleNottelling

BradBot_1
I honestly think a revenue split is neither a practical option, nor one that people would want to do.

Two big issues that I see:

We aren't a payment processor.

We can't "split" a payment and have some of the payment go to us and some of the payment go to the account owner. We'd need to do two separate transactions to do so. The 2nd one would either need to be paid by the client, or be paid by the administrator, but this leads to issue #2.

Transaction fees.

Unless people are donating large portions of their revenue or dealing with large transactions rather than smaller ones, transaction fees will very quickly consume any portion of the revenue that they may be sharing with us.

Let's use Stripe for this example. They charge 2.9% + 30¢ for every successful transaction. If someone makes a $15 payment for a server they are renting and the user does a 5% revenue split, then the amount going to FOSSBilling would be 75¢. The stripe fee would be a bit under half of that at 32¢. If they are handling even smaller transactions of $5 a month, then the picture becomes even worse. 5% of that is 25¢. The fee would be 30¢ on that transaction, 31¢ if Stripe rounds up the .725¢ that their 2.9% fee adds on.
None of this is even considering the additional fees they could add depending on the situation.

Now, these can be more or less eliminated if they decide to perform a monthly donation, but in that case they can just hop onto our Open Collective or our GitHub and select the option to donate. That's a lot simpler both for us, and the FOSSBilling user.

liamgibbins

Paid vs community support (paid offers faster feature updates).
hosted fossbilling option, like WordPress does.
Basic payment addons free (PayPal, bank transfer etc), paid payment addons like merchant payment accounts etc like bank payment processes and pos solutions.
Donations button in footer of website (people don't like giving money but I donate to hestiacp, a little but at least I do).
Advertising on website, doesn't look good but it is an option.

Minds gone blank now lol

S4-John

liamgibbins Thanks for the suggestions.

We have briefly discussed advertising on the FOSSBilling website before and the general opinion (including my own strongly) is that isn't a route we want to go down in the near future.

Paid support is a possible future option but needs to be done properly. If you are going to charge people for support plans then that needs to come with a Service Level Agreement. I would also be against it giving priority for feature requests, these should be assessed on a community value level.

Anuril

On the chance of repeating myself - Let's ask the users what value they received from FOSSBilling, and what the continued development and existence of FOSSBilling is worth to them.

Read more about the Value 4 Value model here. https://value4value.info/

I would propose that we create the "Merchant Guild of the Digital Oceans" - Where the users of FOSSBilling - "The Deckhands of the Merchant Guild of the Digital Oceans" can obtain Ranks based on their Donation Levels:

We could also allow Organizations to become Trade Partners

Of course, these are only suggestions and would need to be fleshed out.

jay

Ranks based on donation levels would be excellent once the project has a stable release. As a potential user, I must suggest the project focuses on,

Getting a stable release (without security bugs and feature bugs) (and a road map with dates to track progress)

At this time, I would suggest prioritizing feature requests from paying supporters. I would support feature requests and bug fixes in following groups,

New/multiple domain registrar integrations and fixing old ones
New/multiple payment processor integrations and fixing old ones
New themes and fixing old ones

Features I'd rather not have now (few examples),

#308 Cloudflare Turnstile - Cloudflare should be paying to act as MITM
#1409 Upload Attachments - Excellent post-stable feature request, not worthy of wasting time now