We need to talk about funding

You might have missed this, but since 2016 my full-time work on OctoPrint has been 100% funded by people like you. OctoPrint, at its core, is still mostly a one-woman show, with me its creator as its only full time resource, and I’ve only been able to keep working on it thanks to the generous support of the community.

Sadly, the financial crisis currently happening across the globe is also affecting me, and things are starting to get worrying. While OctoPrint’s usage numbers have steadily grown by 30% since 2021 to an all time high of now over 150000 active instances (and that’s just the ones I know about), financial support for my work on OctoPrint has dropped by over 30% over that same time, with most of this decline happening over the course of the past 12 months. And meanwhile, thanks to the ongoing inflation, my expenses have only increased as well - power, hosting of website, forums and tracking server, various domains, backups, etc, all of that costs money, and that doesn’t even yet include my own living expenses. Long story short, if things continue the way they are, I will have to throw in the towel, and that will be the end of OctoPrint for me.

I love working on OctoPrint, and I love being able to provide it to you for free. But I also need to pay my bills, and I can’t do that if financial support keeps dropping like this. There’s still time to turn this around, but that will require your help, and some changes.

How you can help

If you are using OctoPrint, please consider chipping in and supporting my work on it. There are several ways to do so:

• Become a GitHub Sponsor (recurring & one-time)
• Become a Patreon Patron (recurring)
• Support me on Ko-Fi (recurring & one-time) 🆕
• Support me on Donorbox (recurring & one-time)
• Support me on Liberapay (recurring)
• Support me on PayPal (one-time)

You can also find all of these on the dedicated support page.

Obviously I’m not expecting everyone to chip in, but if you are using OctoPrint and can afford to support its development, please consider doing so. Even a small amount helps, and if enough people chip in, it can make a huge difference. Even more so when it’s given recurringly. And if you can’t afford to chip in, please consider spreading the word instead. The more people know about this, the better.

Finally, if you are a company and are using OctoPrint in your business, please consider becoming a corporate sponsor. You’ll not only ensure OctoPrint’s future development and thus its usefulness to you, but depending on your contribution you’ll also get your link and logo on octoprint.org and get mentioned in the about dialog of OctoPrint itself. And let’s be honest, it’s the right thing to do! 😉 Get in touch with me!

What I will do on my end

Since the general feedback I got over the years was that people didn’t even know they could financially support my work on OctoPrint, I will be making this a more prominent topic in the future. I’ve already started work on some changes for OctoPrint 1.10.0 that will put options to financially support my work on OctoPrint more into the spotlight, and I will also be making some more changes to octoprint.org and the forums to make it easier to find the support options.

I apologize in advance to those of you who’ve been supporting me throughout the years and might feel a bit annoyed by this, but I hope you understand that I need to do this in order to keep working on OctoPrint. I will try to keep it as unobtrusive as possible, but I also need to make sure that people know that they can support my work on OctoPrint if they want to, and how to do that.

Thank you for your understanding and your support! Let’s turn this around!