On Sunday we’re making an important change to the service, which I hope you’ll agree is good news. From May 1st onwards we’re dropping the requirement to add money to your account to keep your Flattr button active.

What does this mean?

Flattr will con tinue to work exactly as it does today. We’re simply removing the one requirement that has kept some people away from Flattr and that’s caused some mixed feelings in the community.

If you’re someone that’s using Flattr primarily to make micropayments to others then you’ll soon have tons more blogs and websites to flattr.

If you’re using Flattr to both pay and get paid, you now no longer need to worry whether your Flattr button is active. Feel free to add money to your account and flattr others at your own pace.

If you have removed a Flattr button from your blog or website because it had become inactive you can add it back, it’s active again.

And if you’re not using Flattr yet, now (actually, Sunday) is a really good time to start.

Why are we doing this?

The give before you get principle has served Flattr well. More than 175.000 things have been flattred almost half a million times, and we have more impressive numbers up our sleeves. But we know this requirement has put some people off Flattr, for example people that don’t trust new systems enough to enter their credit card number as the first thing. Which means there is less flattrable content out there than there could be.

The second reason for dropping the requirement is that … it seems we don’t need it. Originally we thought that Give to get was necessary in a world where everyone is both creator and consumer of the content. We assumed we needed to nudge people to give and not just get, but numbers show we’ve under-estimated our audience. More than half of people using the service only pay others without expecting to get paid on Flattr, which suggests that our give to get rule is outdated.

Thoughts, comments?

In short, dropping the need to add money to your account means that more people will have access to Flattr and there will be more great content to flattr. All around awesome.

We hope you’ll agree this is a good move for everyone. Please voice your comments, questions or concern below – or if it’s relating to your account then through the support page.