This evening Matt & I posted on our Patreon campaign for UMCO.

I'm cross-posting here for posterity...

The UMCO Patreon campaign is ending

Reflecting back on the past 2 years of running our Patreon campaign, we've had great success and gained quite a few backers (which we are extremely grateful for), but at the same time we've learned a few things about what running a successful campaign actually means for OSS and what the expectations this brings.

We started our Patreon campaign as a way to explore how we could formalise a support strategy for our UMCO projects. It gave agencies and individuals a way to financially support our packages, whilst keeping them free and open-source. From the outside, it may look like we've succeeded in doing that, but the reality is that the what it brings in, isn't enough to schedule dedicated time to our packages so we are mostly supporting them in our spare time much like we previously had been doing.

Unfortunately, by having people support us financially, it has also brought additional demands and stresses to our projects that makes supporting them much harder than it was prior to the campaign.

We started to feel guilty that we weren't showing enough effort to our Patreon supporters. If we took a holiday or had a quiet month, people may wonder what we were up to. Self-guilting ourselves into feeling we needed a constant presence or even to get a patch release out.

Adding to this, the Patreon model may have given the wrong impression, in that paying $100 a month would entitle an agency to dedicated support of our Umbraco packages. Which would be a gross undervaluing our services.

Ultimately, Patreon was an experiment and from that experiment we have learned that Patreon isn't the right approach for us.

We'd like to thank everyone for their support...