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Changes to the Capawesome Insiders program

We have decided to make some changes to the Capawesome Insiders program. In this blog post, we will explain the reasons for these changes and what they mean for you as a sponsor.

Why are we making these changes?

In the past, we released new plugins exclusively for our sponsors first, our so-called Sponsorware. Each of these plugins was tied to a funding goal that had to be reached in order for the plugin to be released to the public. We have already been able to fund and release several plugins in this way:

  1. Android Battery Optimization
  2. Android Foreground Service
  3. Datetime Picker
  4. File Opener

While we are very grateful for the support of our sponsors, we have noticed that this approach has some disadvantages:

  1. No stable funding: After each goal reached, there has been a drop in funding, which has made it difficult for us to secure long-term funding for the development of new sponsorware. Since Capawesome is no longer a side project for us, we need to ensure that we have a stable source of income to continue developing and maintaining our open-source projects.
  2. Quality decline: We have realized that it's simply not possible to maintain the same quality for our sponsorware plugins after releasing them to the public. This is because we have to focus on new sponsorware plugins to keep the program attractive for our sponsors. This has led to a decline in the quality of our open-source plugins, which is not acceptable to us.
  3. Few contributions from the community: This meant that the release of the plugins had almost no added value for us, while the maintenance effort steadily increased as more developers now had access to the plugins.

What are the changes?

We have therefore decided to revise the Capawesome Insiders program. From now on, there will no longer be any funding goals and we will instead either release plugins immediately or make them permanently available exclusively for sponsors, depending on the maintenance effort and complexity. This way, we can not only guarantee the quality of our plugins, but also ensure stable funding. Besides that, we have also updated the pricing of the sponsorship tiers to make them more attractive:

  • Individual Insider: $9/month (previously $15/month)
  • Business Insider: $49/month (previously $50/month)

These prices are not only available to new sponsors, but also to existing sponsors who want to switch to the new pricing.