Wormholes

This has been a major concern for me as well...

Why:
Money, yes the age old argument. I work freelance on the side now to earn enough money to provide for my family which has been my priority lately (also why I have been very MIA this year). This freelance work is taking the time I used to dedicate to working on Tripwire, and I need this income now more than even since I am getting married July 23rd and my wife will be going back to college this fall if we can make enough money that is.

Lately I have had to ask for donations to even just keep the Tripwire servers running (~$60/month).

I DO have some progress adapting Tripwire to use CREST but it is far from complete but it IS AVAILABLE to the public via an open source branch on BitBucket. This still requires at least 100 hours of work so I just don't see any way for me to complete this by October.

Some have suggested I raise funds to compensate me the time ($20-30 per hour). I have tried this before by selling t-shirts which only ended up raising about $200 after costs and not counting the hours spent packing and shipping and running everything. So if this is something the community wants it will need to be a drive someone else runs.

As it stands atm I am planning to shut Tripwire servers down this fall and discontinue the project :(

Thanks for everyone's support

Only a small part of my Corp spends any real time in W-space, and none of us can imagine living without this tool.

We would all be willing to donate or pay for the tool if it converts to subscribition. All of us would pay $5-10 per year and I imagine the big W-space groups would see that as a bargain.

Daimian,

If half the current user base paid $5 a year for the tool, would that cover your costs / time?

Set it up for this! I messaged you on twitter the other day and donated. I (and I imagine many others) were not aware of the situation. I'm sure if you put a message on the home page, many others would happily do the same. I use this tool for hours every day. Dropping some cash on it is totally worth.

At 2300 unique users, how many of those are unique/active corporation masks? I would think setting up a payment scheme for corporate masks would be the easiest and most reasonable way to monetize the project in some way. If of those 2300 people, there are 300 active corporations, at $5 a month (which is totally reasonable for a group of people) that would be a significant income.

EDIT: Post on the r/eve and r/evetech Reddits. Getting the word out is definitely going to be the most significant barrier. Another alternative, how much would adds replacing the donate button in the main UI with google ads or something help? I know passive adds don't do much, but as long as they're not intrusive, I'm sure no one would mind.

You could look into setting up Patreon. It should be relatively low effort way to raise funds.

Do one of them there crowd fund thing'me'bobs..... I would donate.

Start a patreon, have minimum donation be a dollar. Most people will sub for the dollar and forget about it. Well worth a buck in my mind and I barely go into W-space.

Sign me up

I really like the idea of the Patreon. Sadly the License agreement fro CREST clearly states you are not allowed to change money for any application. Nor are you allowed to distinguish between donors and non-donors in how you deliver your content (eg. removal of Ads).
There might be some grey areas that might be possible if they are outside of the App (e.g. have a 10$ per month level to be able to vote on new features). Since it has only to do with the development process and not the App itself it might not be covered by the CREST agreement)

Set up a Patreon and have like levels of 1$,2$,5$,10$,20$,50$ per month. Someone from an Alliance might say he wants to donate in the name of all of his members. And have a thank you page with the last month donors with their Eve-Name and Corp/Alliance so its visible who keeps the site running.

I really hope this will work out.

Sorry, but a mapper that doesnt automap is not remotely useful. it certainly wouldnt be used over any mapper that did.

IIRC there is a PayPal button on the landing page, plus maybe on the bottom of the page while in use?

I for one am all for chipping in if it means helping you, TW works for me in a way the other competitors don't.

Also, congratulations on the wedding! Wish you the best o7