On the state of OctoPrint

A bit over a month ago I shared with you the bad news that the funding situation of OctoPrint had changed and that I needed your help in order to keep going.

The response I’ve gotten since has been overwhelming. At the time of writing this, 740 of you have become Patrons on the Patreon campaign and a further 86 contributed through PayPal. And let’s not forget the huge effort by everyone of spreading the message throughout the social networks. Thank you all so much for having my back like this! When the funding crisis hit, I was worried about OctoPrint’s and my own future, and pretty uncertain about how my reaching out to you would turn out. Your response has blown me away and I’m humbled by the support and encouragement I’ve received over these past weeks.

So where does that leave us? I for one feel cautiously optimistic :)

Looking at the funding situation right now I’ll be able to continue working on OctoPrint. Since I’ll basically be self-employed from now on, that also means I’ll have to constantly keep an eye on how funding develops over time and build up a bit of a buffer in case something unexpected happens (Patreon going belly up, big sponsors leaving, german tax law surprises, stuff like this). Which in turn means that while I’ll mostly focus on OctoPrint (as before), I’ll also be looking into occasional side gigs to make sure that my work on OctoPrint stays funded. And of course it should be expected that some people who are contributing now might not be able to do so in the future, so I hope to also see the Patreon campaign attract new backers to compensate for the loss of current ones.

On top of that I’m also still looking into company funding and I hope I can convince some more businesses to jump in ;)

For now it pleases me greatly to announce that Aleph Objects Inc., makers of the Lulzbot line of printers and big proponents of Free Software, recently reached out and we’ve come to an agreement that will help tremendously in keeping things afloat!

To sum it up, I’m deeply grateful to everyone who’s already decided to support my work on OctoPrint, and I’m committed to fight to keep things going. I expect there to be set backs and I still need to build up a bit of a funding cushion to make sure something like what happened before won’t happen again, but I’m set on this path of self employed and crowd funded Open Source development now :)

Cheers,

Gina