Now Accepting Bitcoin

Typica is free software. It's free to download, free to use, the source code is freely available and people are free to modify it to suit their needs, but ensuring that Typica remains freely available is not without cost, nor is ongoing development of the software. The vast majority of these costs are being covered out of my own pocket, but I can't afford to do all of the work that I'd like to do. Indeed, just keeping computers required to build new releases has been a challenge. One of the reasons that there has not been a 1.7.1 release yet is that the computer used to build the Mac version died shortly after building 1.7.0.

At the time I'm writing this, we're about half way through the year 2017 and outside funding directed toward Typica for the year has totalled $0.00. You're reading that right. A program that's being used by roasting companies all over the world has not gotten direct financial support from any of the companies using it this year. To avoid losing money on just the hosting side of things I've put some advertising on this site. I've been directing revenue from my online videos toward Typica as well over the past few years, but these revenue streams are tiny and unreliable. If I were paying myself minimum wage, these revenue sources would not even cover the time that I spend answering email from people with questions or feature requests and if I look at all of the funding compared with all of the spending related to Typica over the past decade, there's a substantial shortfall that's been coming out of my own pocket.

I didn't release Typica as free software to get rich, but it's also a fact that there are a lot of ways that the software can be improved that I just have not been able to work on solely for lack of a budget. It's nice that a lot of people find the feature set that already exists in Typica to be mature and useful enough that they're choosing Typica over other options and not seeing a need to support further development, but I know better than anybody where changes could be made to make existing features easier to use, more useful, or less prone to errors, and that there are other features that would be broadly useful if added.

There have been people who have expressed interest in supporting this work financially, but when it comes to writing a check and dropping it in the mail, that simply has not happened this year, and I can count on fingers the number of times it has happened over the past decade. For those who prefer to use a credit card, I've previously suggested using the fan funding feature on my YouTube channel. While nobody has used that this year and YouTube quietly killed the feature recently so nobody can use that anymore, I'd like to thank both of exactly two people who did use that feature while it was available in past years. In the longer term, I'd like to set things up so that I can accept credit card payments on this site, but considering how few people have followed through on a stated intention to support Typica financially, this hasn't been a high priority.

Today I've updated the FAQ to include another way to support the development of Typica financially. I'm now accepting Bitcoin at the address: 185xq2C3dbWH56n26XZKK2C4SZ6c2binei. I have no idea if anybody will go for that, but there's no cost to providing the option and people in some parts of the world might find that to be a more attractive option.

If additional support does not come, so be it. I'll continue to do the best I can with the resources that I have, but I truly believe that faster development would benefit everybody using Typica.