I was thinking today that it would be great for kiCAD to have a crowdfunding feature wishlist.
Let me explain myself :
I guess all daily users of kiCAD here have a killer feature in mind
Often this feature is not necessarily the one prioritized in the next release (which is completely fine of course)
Paid features are sometimes placed on top of the list
→ Would’t it be nice to be able to “vote” for next features while contributing financially to the project ? As such there would be an intermediate between the donation and the paid feature.
→ It would be a strong incentive for people to donate as they would be thinking “I’m paying because I really crave that feature”
In our case for instance were are using kiCAD for power electronics applications. Our goal is to develop the Arduino for energy, a modular, versatile board that can fit multiple use cases (both for DCDC and DCAC).
The killer feature we dream of is a proper GUI for the custom constraint editor. (And I know we’re not alone on it) but we are not rich enough to fund it ourself entirely unfortunately.
We would love to participate as much as we can in a kind of dedicated crowdfund. Even if in the end another feature get crowdfunded first and get prioritized for instance.
Have the developers given you an estimate/quote on this feature? That is the place to start. The biggest problem I foresee is getting the proper entities to have eyes on these features. This site has a core of supporters but many come only when they need help and may disappear for years in between.
You’ll need to write up a full description of the feature for both the potential contributors and the developers to assess.
The feature would have to fit within the developers’ design roadmap. Remember that a feature represents a maintenance load in the future.
There are dedicated crowdfunding sites which you can use to manage the crowdfunding process, and this is where you would publish your pitch and try to direct contributors to.
There must have been crowdfunded contributions to other open-source projects. You could search for those to learn from those experiences.
Is it possible to get partway there with a less tightly coupled solution like a plugin, even as a proof-of-concept?
You need to get one or more of the experienced KiCad developers to assess if your feature is going to fit into the KiCad structure and not break something else. It also has to be able to work on all OS platforms - not always easy.
Sure. This sort of crowdfunding, vote by donations idea has been worked on periodically. The major headache has been building the backend. This involves getting a webhook to take paypal and Stripe results, parse them and update a database somewhere. Then, on the KiCad website, show some totals that pull from the database.
This takes some doing by someone skilled in a number of tools and motivated to get it done.
We could take the easy road tomorrow and make it manually updated but this takes developer time away from working on KiCad proper, so is probably counter-productive. This is what we do for the fund drive and it does require a bit of work.
Alternatively, we utilize an existing solution. These platforms will handle project-based funding under a larger umbrella. However, they all ask for between 9-12% of the funds raised. For comparison, our stripe overhead is up to 4.5% (for non-US based, non-USD donations)
If people donate towards a specific thing, rather than to the project in general, there is a risk that they will get upset if that specific thing doesn’t happen quickly enough, or isn’t implemented they way they think it should be, etc. They might even demand their money back!
Paid development needs to start from a very clear and agreed-upon spec (the KiCad team won’t just implement anything just because someone throws money at the problem, there needs to be agreement on whether it is a good idea to implement it, and how). Then, if someone does a crowdfunding campaign for that spec, at least people who donate to it know what has been agreed upon.
Wokwi has an interesting take on this kind of funding. You can submit features to a wish list and then buy votes to push a feature further up this wish list.
Thanks for all the insights !
I understand better what would be the tradeoff of a such fundraising feature.
It would require to have detailed spec for each feature so that people know what they would crowdfund in detail.
Validation from the kiCAD team that it is feasible on these specs
Clear warnings and conditions for donators so that they can’t turn grumpy
A big effort to have a dedicate “swimlane” of donations and progress bar which need dedicated development without paying huge fees to third party services.
I the biggest potential drawback would also be to divert people to donate to the project, toward feature oriented donation which is obviously not the same funding “quality” as it can not be used at the will of the lead devs…
So to make it worthy it would require to get significantly more donation this way than through a regular project based funding I guess…
Maybe it’s worth a try exploring a third party service just to see if there is significantly more donation “traction” this way ?
You could use the feature request section on this forum to flesh out the details and gauge interest and feasibility before going through too much more effort.
I guess there is a slight misunderstanding, I’m not really asking any feature here.
I was only trying to figure out if a crowdfunding system for features would make sense for kiCAD, and what could be the potential drawbacks of the approach.
I was just giving our case as an example, because my guess is we are possibly representative of the typical small business using kiCAD, and cannot fund a feature all by ourselves but could do it through a collective funding system.
I read most of the comments as general, to do with crowd funding. Only a couple aimed at you in particular.
One comment I have noticed missing is: Even if time, money, terms and approval have been organised, is there someone sufficiently interested and qualified to complete a particular commission?
Hello,
I would welcome the opportunity to increase the priority of the feature with a financial donation.
I suggest adding the possibility to tie a financial donation to the support of some function (something like a like button with a financial basis). I imagine it so that on the form for sending a financial donation there would be an optional field for the ticket number in gitlab (for example Allow external arrow in the dimension tool (#5819) · Issues · KiCad / KiCad Source Code / kicad · GitLab) Each issue would thus have its virtual account and the priority would shift based on the amount saved.
Yes, you do have a point. It has to be simplified a lot.
When the users make a donation, you can give them a small text box to write a wish that will be saved with the donation.
You can also pre-define a few of your own ‘nice to have ideas’ and ask the paying users which idea they like the most. So, the paying user will feel that he/she is getting heard.
It is both helping you fund raise more and helping you getting to know what the paying users want.
Given the demands that some folks make when they don’t pay anything at all, think of what they will demand when they pay $10, i.e. infinitely more than $0. These are also the same people who will be the loudest, most annoying folks that will likely consume more resources than the donation they make. The question is, would the extra funding some sort of voting system brings in make up for it? It might work if there is a small number of key features that people select from a list, as mentioned above.
There are already wishlists/feature requests and you can vote on them or submit your own. If one can use a complex software like KiCad, can one really not handle this low barrier?
That’s a great idea! Offering users a choice to allocate donations towards specific new features in KiCad could be an engaging way to support development and prioritize features that matter most to the community. It not only empowers users by giving them a say in the product’s evolution but also provides developers with valuable feedback on user preferences. This approach could potentially boost fundraising efforts and foster a stronger sense of community involvement.
I hope the KiCad team considers implementing this suggestion!
(and paid for)