Though I completely agree it's a good idea to directly sell Krita one day, I think it needs to be more stable and gain popularity for it to be a good plan.

slangkamp wrote:I think a developer centric funding is much better than selling it per version or download. It's a much more personal connection between users and developers even if it's harder to keep that up. Of course you could slap a high price on it, but that would lead to people ignoring or pirating it. How would Krita be different than any of the other products?

I think it depends on the OS... Selling Krita per download on OSX should work, showing a big fat donate button for Linux and Windows, subscriptions to the CentOS repo, and at the same time actively soliciting people to support the development fund (which of course gives gratis access to all versions) and support for specific projects.

So... We need to fix the download page to show the donate buttons, and fix the donate page to somehow make it possible to have a write-in amount for the personal subscription, and a second, company subscription at a higher amount.

Also, it would be good to figure out a way to non-manually show the current funding status of Krita. But that might be hard.

If I can offer some thoughts as a owner/user of:

1.Artrage: $49,90
2.Clip studio Paint Pro: $49,99
3.Mypaint: Free
4.Photoshop CS6: about €670 at the time I bought it
5.Affinity Designer: $49,99
6.Gimp: Free
7.Autodesk Sketchbook: Free

Most of them on both Windows/OSX.

I installed Krita on OSX quite a few times (Macports first now the native) and there were always some showstopping problems. Since there are quite a few alternatives available for painting purposes at Free/Low price that work I didn't bother with it. Now there will be (soon) even a photoshop like image manipulation software called Affinity Photo at a low price ($49,99 probably), making Krita fall off my radar even more. I would really love to use it since it looks to have loads of potential but if the focus is only on painting and no quality OSX port, I guess I'll stick to alternatives.

Custom channels, painting on multiple channels, non-destructive edits (objects/symbols) would be great. If I'm missing something thats already there please feel free to correct me.

Well, a quality OSX port takes money, and since that money isn't there yet, there isn't a quality OSX port yet. Which is why you've got issues with the existing ports .

As for the focus of Krita, that's painting, creating art from scratch, and I don't think we should change our focus just when Krita is getting recognition for what it is.

el_diablo wrote:If I can offer some thoughts as a owner/user of:

1.Artrage: $49,90
2.Clip studio Paint Pro: $49,99
3.Mypaint: Free
4.Photoshop CS6: about €670 at the time I bought it
5.Affinity Designer: $49,99
6.Gimp: Free
7.Autodesk Sketchbook: Free

Most of them on both Windows/OSX.

I installed Krita on OSX quite a few times (Macports first now the native) and there were always some showstopping problems. Since there are quite a few alternatives available for painting purposes at Free/Low price that work I didn't bother with it. Now there will be (soon) even a photoshop like image manipulation software called Affinity Photo at a low price ($49,99 probably), making Krita fall off my radar even more. I would really love to use it since it looks to have loads of potential but if the focus is only on painting and no quality OSX port, I guess I'll stick to alternatives.

Custom channels, painting on multiple channels, non-destructive edits (objects/symbols) would be great. If I'm missing something thats already there please feel free to correct me.

Uhm, well, you did read the post right?

The problem is that there's no funding for it, and whatever gets funded first gets focus. So what we are looking for is help to spread knowledge about Krita amongst osx users, because otherwise it's useless to start a kickstarter whatsoever. Unless you have... 30000 euro lying around you wouldn't mind donating towards this goal

We will always have competitors, as 2d programs are a gazillion, so that's not something to be affected at.
If you say 'well, I'm not going to help out because there's plenty of other alternatives for mac', well, okay, if all mac osx users are like that, then there's no point in investing time into the kickstarter, because we still need to have a certain name-recognition for there to be enough OSX users to pool together 30000 euro, and we just can't do both in the time limit you are suggesting is there.

What I am trying to say is that, if you, as a mac user, are willing to help out Krita by posting discussion threads on mac and osx forums(because that's all we really need), there's much more chance that setting up a kickstarter will be worthwhile.

We, as majorly linux and windows users can't actually go to those types of forums to talk about getting Krita on the Mac, because we just aren't part of their cultural group, we know nothing about the avarage feelings towards osx versions, we know nothing about the feelings on kickstarters, we know nothing about the overal osx experience, and that's why we need OSX users to make those threads.
(Tl;dr: We don't want to come off as greedy advertisers that are detached from their user base, we have a lot of respect towards our user-base, being users ourselves.)

The point I was (unsuccessfully it seems) trying to make is that to get funding I would guess that first there should be a need and a prospect. Is there? I tried to justify using Krita and join in on the donating opportunities, but there is just nothing I can see that makes Krita special for my use.

If or when there is a OSX port that I could use daily in my professional work I would gladly pay/donate up to $40-50 for it. Until then I need to use software that works for me since my daily bread depends on it.

Enthusiasts and amateurs might disagree .

Ah, well in a way you have exactly the same reasoning as us, but applied to yourself.

Which means, it'll be stuck in circular reasoning forever. Pity.

Edit: I misunderstood, that's not circular at all. Anyhow... We have HDR-colours painting, that's something that's rather rare in most graphics programs, but interesting to a texture and (especially) render artist. As well, the transformation masks are nearly done, and layer effects-development has just started, so overal Krita will have a lot of neat nondestructive editing features in the next release. (As well, it's painting program first and foremost, and the feedback we often get is that due to Krita's many brush-engines and neat features it's a FUN program to use, which is great if you're a concept artist.)

Keep these in mind when to wonder whether Krita's worth your time.

But like I said, mentioning Krita on Mac forums, or places where the mac is used lots would be helpful towards us setting up a dedicated kickstarter.

Sorry about being daft, is there an active way to donate for the OSX port right now?

Not in small amounts. You can contact boud for large donations. The administration and ethics involved in small donations would be very complex. (Like, if you donate now, yet there's too little interest to do a proper mac port for a long time, how would we handle that donation amount, how would you request it back when you get tired of us, etc)

I'm sorry if I made it seem it would be that way, but kickstarters have time limits, so it's good to prepare for them. Which is why we first need an army of mac users to help spread the word before we can start the kickstarter

TheraHedwig wrote:Not in small amounts. You can contact boud for large donations. The administration and ethics involved in small donations would be very complex. (Like, if you donate now, yet there's too little interest to do a proper mac port for a long time, how would we handle that donation amount, how would you request it back when you get tired of us, etc)

I'm sorry if I made it seem it would be that way, but kickstarters have time limits, so it's good to prepare for them. Which is why we first need an army of mac users to help spread the word before we can start the kickstarter

Yep, that sounds realistic. I'll do my best to promote Krita to fellow OSX users and donate through the website for now.

Also in my opinion the best way to promote Krita is through timelapse semi-viral painting videos. I know I found out about it that way (David Revoy).

I know through the last kickstarter, there was an idea of originally allowing people to contribute money with what features they wanted most. Each feature had a euros amount. Once the amount would be reached, that would mean the feature would get the green light to get worked on. Like a bountysource.com thing

It is not an 'all or nothing' scenario like a Kickstarter is.

That way funding campaigns are on-going and money will steadily stream in -- instead of one small-window 30 day campaign every 6 months. If we don't catch someone looking at the news in that 30 day window, there is a good chance they will forget and not come back. You never know when people will be interested in donating!

You could even tie the bounties in the news and posts. "If we only get 300 more, we can add feature X. We are almost there!"

We could even put the features list on the homepage sidebar by the news to show what features are being worked on, or others that are close to being reached.

Bite size chunks.

I think consumers can understand results better that way when donating money. When you have to raise 30,000, you don't feel like you are really contributing much when you can only give a very small percentage of that full amount. Being able to donate 10-20% of a single feature makes your donation feel like it makes more of a difference. Personally, I would donate more money if this mechanism existed.

People will feel empowered that "their" features are getting added. This will also help prioritize what people REALLY care about. Priorities shouldn't stem from one person that makes a complaint in this forum which is what happens now.

The problem with smaller funding things is that it takes a lot of media management, so we need to be absolutely certain we can keep up the media management while making sure the coders actually have time for coding...

(And some things, like the LOD, just can't be bounty-sourced. It's just a big fat important feature that you can't implement bit by bit)

EDIT: We're gonna set up a Patreon anyway, so we could see if some things can be set per feature(something patreon allows, but I'm not sure if it allows feature-specific AND subscription specific projects)

EDIT2: It doesn't, it's either per month or per creation... :x

TheraHedwig : If there is no money, there is no coding. If we get a lot of money, there will be a lot more coding. This post is about ways to get more funding.

Also, what do you mean by "media management"?

Coding is nice, but coding by itself doesn't help anything. We need to spend more time getting people's feedback and finding the best ways to gauge interest and satisfy their needs. Forums like this generally attract a lot of trolls and complainers. It isn't the best way to find out what the majority of the Krita userbase wants. We need a better feedback mechanism for what most people want.

We get 60K visitors a month coming to Krita.org (last I checked). Most visit the homepage. That seems to be the best place to advertise and promote anything that we think is important. The people that visit krita.org are our target audience. Those are the people that *might* donate. I imagine people that donate are people that have used Krita before. Would you donate to an application you have never used?

People like to get excited about things. Individual features seem like a steady stream of things to get excited about when they reach their goal.

Another idea -- How difficult is it to donate now through the site? Could we make that easier for people?
- The donate buttons look pretty generic and is kind of far down the page (https://krita.org/support-us/donations/)
- I wonder if there is a way we can integrate paypal into the site. Stop the donate button from going to an outside site.

TheraHedwig : If there is no money, there is no coding. If we get a lot of money, there will be a lot more coding. This post is about ways to get more funding.

Also, what do you mean by "media management"?

Coding is nice, but coding by itself doesn't help anything. We need to spend more time getting people's feedback and finding the best ways to gauge interest and satisfy their needs. Forums like this generally attract a lot of trolls and complainers. It isn't the best way to find out what the majority of the Krita userbase wants. We need a better feedback mechanism for what most people want.

I was more reffering to boud having stress-headaches around march, because he was doing the vast majority of the PR, the administration, the funding and big coding projects on his own. I would like to have this organised in such a way that everyone can do what they are best at without burning out. Burn outs are not very fun in principle and just leave a lot destruction in their wake.

Sorry, I meant press-handling, updating all the social networks, PR, instead of media management. Communication is important indeed, but it also requires quite a bit of effort, as you may know, and again, I would like to emphasize we need to focus on streamlining that effort.(Or at the least do basic risk management)

Similarly, we do not actually only get priorities from the forum, I do not know why you think that? Krita is a.o. active on Facebook, Google Plus(boud), Twitter, Steam(Leinir and Stuartmd), Deviantart(Eo`, Stuartmd, me), Youtube(boud, animtim, me), polycount, blenderartists and tumblr(me). That's where we get an idea from what people need. That's how the kickstarter goals were picked from the wishlist in the bugtracker.
We are however, most active on IRC when discussing what people say about Krita, which might be where your confusion comes from.
We also discuss most things on IRC, and I've been trying my utmost best to transfer some of that discussion to the forums, because I can get some people feel a little left out.

We don't want anyone having burnout. i think there is a balancing act that we have to be aware of:

1. focus on development and don't worry too much on funding. There will be little to no budget, but at least there will be potential volunteers that will improve the product. Maybe something will happen in the media/social world on its own.
2. focus on media and funding ideas. Coding will slow down dramatically, but has the potential to boost Krita's income. it also might not.

Based on your comments, it seems like going 100% on both is not going to end well.