José I fully support your endeavour in crowdfunding the further development of the plugin and was concerned and tweeted initially when you announced this issue with continued plugin support as there are many attendant issues in this lack of user support and appreciation for work provided to the community to use for free; I do however have to agree with modemlooper's comments at the head of the page.

I agree with the notion of crowdfunding to get the plugin back on an even keel, to support the running costs & development but this ought to be a one off effort and should not be viewed as a sustainable model for continued development & running costs, if you were to try and run a campaign on a yearly? basis I think you would fine support dropping off, I say this partly as I think many of the initial support will be from fellow developers and active community members rather than the core actual user base & it is those users that need to appreciate the work and accept some sort of cost involved.

I know you have mentioned /thinking about the freemium model & I mentioned that in tweets as probably the best model in the WP community; I would urge that you need to look at this model perhaps looking at at least charging a very small dollar amount pcm to access DB & work on the user numbers making this an amount sufficient to support server costs & basic development. I also agree that you probably should use initial funding to re-brans and re-launch the plugin, which will benefit the plugin all round.

Like modemlooper I do understand the notion of philanthropy but in this context I think the word not the appropriate one, the amount of work involved in something like this plugin is not trivial and requires an investment of time & energy and in practical terms those of us that are jobbing developers can not afford to release this sort of effort without some form of remuneration.

While not wishing to go off at too much of a tangent this issue - as I said on Twitter - raises the problem we see too often with developers and plugin authoring, I don't know the answers here but I see some of the problems that must be addressed and that the WP community desperately needs to have clear focussed open dialogue on what can be done to improve things for authors.

The problems can be loosely expressed as:

* 'Free' This concept was important for WP in gaining traction for the app the Theme api and Plugin api need to to provide users with a healthy choice of themes and functionality to extend their sites with and it did just that, however we seemed to manage to conflate two concepts along the way 'Free' & 'Open Source' as one does not mean the other necessarily.

* 'Free' can all too often tend to devalue the time and effort that actually goes into this work, users simply don't grasp why it's free but as so many themes or plugins do exist pro gratis why should they be having to pay anything & after all the main app is free to use!

* Feeling guilty if we do charge, are we then not being magnanimousness with our time and returning to the community?

I do not decry what was done in establishing the repos on WP, it was important and the availability of good quality plugins & themes important.

Donation links - this has proved to be in the main a fairly redundant means to gain some return on ones work.

I suggest serious dialogue within the WP community as to a new model or at least acknowledged by the community that high quality supported plugins must carry some cost.

At the moment there are seemingly far too many developers questioning why they should bother writing and supporting plugins, this should be a clarion call to action and a worry in general for the WP development community!

José I wish you all the best with the crowdfunding I'm sure the community is going to support you fully and keep your work alive and not something consigned to history, working out the best way forward after that will be the challenge.