☕ Ko-fi component | Thank you with a coffee

All customers, yes, and some developers. :wink:

Absolutely.

I doubt that as well. However, I was arguing more about users supporting the developers of plug-ins they frequently use and like, if there is an option for that. And that McNeel should offer better visibility of supportive measures, both inside Rhino/Grasshopper and on Food4Rhino.

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Indeed, all these services are theoretically great. But most users won’t pay. And if you offer no free option they will either not use it or pirate it. That is the sad reality that none of the services solve and probably never will no matter how many pop ups and reminders there are.

Maybe charging a fee to be able to complain about a free plug-in would be more profitable :grinning:. I know @Dani_Abalde and @TomTom have some thoughts about that haha.

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Yes you are right. I didn’t suggest McNeel to replace Discourse to Discord because of what you say, because they get IDK 50 questions a day, it’s a forum to solve doubts and it only lacks a couple of features to be perfect for that.

Discord is designed to create community, they are not the same, nor are they excluding each other. They can complement each other and it would be great to see that in this ecosystem, Discord has a powerful integration system. Maybe that’s what McNeel needs to regain that social part they lost when they killed the old GH forum. On the other hand, you can create automatic channels for queries and be searched via the server search engine, and before consulting go through a questionnaire that redirects you to questions already asked, or to the FAQ, and filter the results based on your role or experience… if there are no bots that allow something like this the API allows you to do so. But the thing is that neither this nor using Discourse is worth it for a plugin that receives one or two queries per week, IMO. Unless all you want to do is give technical support, then you should use Discourse. But if you want your users to give you feedback, to publish their projects using your plugin, or a thousand other things besides technical support, then Discord gives you the tools to make users interested in doing so.

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Word it as: “A fee to access support.” :wink:

haha well, I think the biggest barrier is to pay the first time, once you do it, many people won’t care about buying a coffee or paying for a plugin if it’s a symbolic price if the creator deserves it. And if you can pay from your mobile via QR code in 15 seconds, even better. Anyway, even if you were right, there is the option to give users a reason to contribute to the author. For example with Peacock (when the new version comes out, it’s currently on development-only-state more or less), my Patreons have benefits on Discord like priority tech support (with text and streaming channels), learning content, testing the tools before they come out, seeing what’s being developed or discuss the development plan, as well as paid plugin extensions. In a year’s time I will be able to validate or not this model, but I believe it will be very successful, if it is not, then there is nothing to do. :sweat_smile:

Are you not interested in using the ko-fi component @Michael_Pryor?

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Nothing against the component. I think its a great idea. I just have little faith in donations and I hope I am wrong, the dev community deserves it. :grinning:

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Precisely :sunglasses:

Do not consider it as a monetisation model (because it is not) but as a model of appreciation. Or if you prefer, as an experiment to measure whether it works or not. It would be good if profiles like yours gave it a chance, I made it for you.

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My experience is the following. In general I believe most people are willing to pay for software, if they (believe they) can afford the software and it solves real problems for them effectively. The truth about Grasshopper and it’s addins is that for the majority of users it just doesn’t solve problems. It rather offers more possibilities, actually creating more of them. Which is fine, but doesn’t motivate to purchase. People then just skip these commercial features.

Others just have very high expectations, because of being inexperienced or having a difficult personality (“One-Click solutions“, “All-in-One”). But there are still a lot of people out there dealing with very dumb work…

It sure does, and I think that it’s an experiment well worth undertaking. There are many beloved add-ons, like for instance Pufferfish that I believe probably more people would support financially than you might think.
The Wasp Patreon launched yesterday, and Andrea already gets about 50€ worth in well-deserved donations per month.

It’s way more complex than that though, and again this thread - as I understand it -, is more about supporting the creators with donations, and not buying software.

Don’t you rather mean “my truth”? Wouldn’t it be possible for an add-on to solve a problem for a user that you don’t really have in what you’re doing. Other plug-ins might simply offer novel feature sets that interested users can explore.

“Cringes”, yes, yes, difficult personality

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Donatinrg is maybe not buying. But in the end money is going from one party to the other in a clear transaction.

You can turn the thing any way you want, but donations are still a way of monetizing. It just isn’t in the traditiional sense of buying something. But it still is monetizing.

FWIW, I’ve done a lot of paid development work on Blender, all made possible through donations.

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It sure does, and I think that it’s an experiment well worth undertaking. There are many beloved add-ons, like for instance Pufferfish that I believe probably more people would support financially than you might think. The Wasp Patreon launched yesterday, and Andrea already gets about 50€ worth in well-deserved donations per month.

Usually with patreon you are giving things to certain donation levels (I think @Dani_Abalde does this with peacock). You don’t need to, but the most successful patreon do. For me it will need to be a lot more than that to consider obligating to certain tutorials, dev schedules, access levels etc. 50€ is about 1 hour pay for a software dev on the low end (at-least in the US). If that’s over a month, I rather just do for free with no obligations on release schedules etc. it’s just not something I can plan dedicated time to. More just here and there. This is of course just me, but if money is the case we should all be getting more. Andrea is very consistent with Wasp dev almost to the point that it seems full time and I hope he eventually makes a lot more for that work. It is a great tool.

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Of course, donations are a form of monetisation, but this component is meant to be a thank you, not to make money. It is mainly intended for those who help on the forum. I don’t want it to be misunderstood so as not to create false expectations. This does not replace a support model for plugin developers that should be in the ecosystem. But I do believe that this component can serve to measure the temperature of support through donations. Let’s get rid of our prejudices and biases and use it for a while. Put your ko-fi account in the comments of food4rhino and in a few months we will see how it works. If it goes wrong it will remain the same as it is now, and if it goes well, maybe even McNeel will work on it, which is what is really needed, because integration is essential for it to work.

If you stop someone from wasting their most valuable resource, time, you deserve to be bought a coffee. It’s not about making money, it’s about appreciation. If people do this, it shows that there is a market that deserves to be explored.

Patreon has two ways of working, by creation or by month. Per creation is like a shop and per month is like a subscription. Creators who offer something in return aspire to make a living from it, offering something maximises the amount of sponsors. But it is not mandatory at all, you can use it as a donation model and don’t offer anything, but of course it will be hard that it can replace your salary in a company in that way. But it is perfectly valid if all you want is to be thanked.

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:crazy_face: Anyway I have been dealing with the international income tax for quite a while. The fact that many donation websites are based in the States creates a shit-ton of issues.

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Ko-fi is UK based, you can share here if you find out what taxes you have for your country.

Mostly likely the obstacle would be accepting foreign-source income would impose tax-reporting burden on the recipient, e.g. you might need to report tax to UK if you receive from Ko-fi, since the payment is processed in the U.K. and treated as a tax deduction from the Ko-fi company. (I might not be correct/accurate on the specific case of Ko-fi)

Generally from several interviews I did in the past, the creator may not need to pay anything but they were afraid of the tax process.

It’s not a big issue, though. Just to provide some of my views.

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Of course this is from my perspective, however if you work in other businesses and you see the tendency to spend money to actually save money, then I always wonder why it’s so hard to ask for some money within the Rhino ecosystem.?! As being said, donating money is paying money, it’s just a another way in doing it. But for me it also has a slight taste of begging and uncertainty :yum:

Don’t get my last comment wrong, I think Grasshopper is super useful, just not for the majority of people. The learning curve to reach a level where it does what you want is just too high. And I believe this is why the majority of people are not into spending any money in a system they don’t really master.

Adequate jobs for computational designer are rare. Another sign of the real-world impact of Grasshopper. So a tool with relatively low impact on professionals might not generate enough demand to keep seat prices low. It’s really a chicken-egg problem. Just think about the VSR plug-in.

I have worked in medium to large design offices (1000+ designer), only a small amount of people could and would use Grasshopper, although it was a well known tool. If you need to invest hundreds of hours to occasionally solve some automation problems, you rather manually build things once in a project or you ask someone helping you out. Instead people want these pragmatic tool, solving import/export issues etc.

So donating is totally fine, I’m not against that at all, but if you really want to make a living with Plug-in development, then this is really hard within Rhino. Without any support, I just don’t believe it’s worth at all. This might change if monetizing becomes simpler for plug-in developer. So Ko-Fi is definitely a step in the right direction!

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I don’t know at what point this turned into a debate about the software business in Rhino, but although I’m interested it’s not the topic here. In the case of plugins, it’s not about making GH plugins commercially viable (especially not through donations!). It’s about supporting the creators, which is a very different thing. It’s about harnessing collective power to carry out a project, not about making money, which is not impossible either.

It’s a bit like someone who criticises twitch streamers and undervalues them by saying they live on charity. Those people don’t understand what’s going on, that it’s actually a lot of people supporting a content creator because they want to help him, so that he owes it to his audience rather than being the image and behaviour that an advertiser expects. Here it’s the same, if we force plugins into the software market, the picture is as you describe, but if we talk about donations without reward, the context is different, people don’t donate to improve their workflow or be more efficient, but to support the creator, to contribute to give credit to those who deserve it.

This should be the debate, because if this is normalised, if donating or asking for donations is no longer seen as begging, but as the support instrument that it is, then there will be an opportunity to carry out plugin development projects without the unbearable cost for an amateur to formalise a software sales company.

If the few who help on this forum or create plugins do not standardise these alternative models, no one wil, and selling licences will remain the only way, while everyone wants everything for free.

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Regardless of posts here, it’s a well-done component!

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When I’m donating, I donating my old phone or laptop to the child of my unemployed friends. Or I do indirectly donate some money to the local child hospice. I would never call supporting a blue haired teen playing videogames a “donation”. Its a misuse of the word itself. Many ‘Twitch streamers’ are running their channel as a buisness. They have to pay taxes and the difference is basically that you leave the user to determine the price for the entertainment. I sometimes buy a beer of my local brewery just to support them, its not the best beer at all, but I don’t name it “donation”. That would be pretty weird to me.

But I also think that plugin developer should get some monitary support, thats why I like that component…