lovedigit
👽 Chevereto Freak
Update: After seeing the "powered by" tab in person which was released on v3.20.0.beta.1, I no longer share these opinion. I am for chevereto branding now because the new text gives credit to the website, while mentioning that website is powered by chevereto. Which in my opinion is good thing, and I for one proudly welcome it as a change.
First of all, it is not even showing the branding publicly. And it gives credit to the website at the same time while providing the perfect platform to convey some of the information related to website operation.
Chevereto deserves all the exposure it can get. If it grows bigger, we'll be the one to benefit from it, because if Rodolfo looses interest it will just be one of those software that rarely gets updates. To keep him motivated, and to handle this huge code base, we need him to stay interested. Most of the people has no idea how much it would cost us if we had to develop a website like this from scratch and if we had to build it ourselves, we'll have to spend more than a year to perfect it.
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I saw the recent announcement about showing chevereto branding in users settings. Sorry, for sounding rude, but I don't mean to. If I do, it is only because English is not my first language.
Forcing your brands on your paid customer's user base; that they worked hard to build over a long time is not a way to go. It took me 4 years to build this community. I spent countless hours building trust.
No other paid public facing software (I know) does this, and when they do, there is always a way to legally white label the software.
Let me lay it out this way, our users (at least mine) are not your potential customers. They are using our website because either they don't know how to host a website as it is too technical for them, or they feel like it is cheaper for them to host on our website instead of getting their own self-hosted website (99% of my users think $2/month is way too much to pay for image host). And in some cases it is both.
People already know about chevereto, you don't have to be insecure about it. Everywhere I go, chevereto is always on top in self-hosted communities, where people are actually looking for software like this.
It is one thing to enforce it for free customers, but for someone who paid for it, and when it wasn't there at the time of buying the license. It seems aggressively enforced.
If current monetization plan doesn't work for you, then you shouldn't have allowed one time license purchase. Come up with better plan. Specially, now when most of the software are subscription based.
If you're really adamant to go this route, consider a yearly small fees for white label, where website owner is free to remove chevereto branding when they pay a fixed fees each year.
Or, better yet, make license plans based on this, and change your current model.
For example; Core license $30 One time fee, then $15/year extra for white label.
Network License, $90 one time fee, then $10/year per domain for white label.
You can come up with better plan, because you know your customers better. Also, you are the only one who'll be able to gauze how much these white label should cost.
Like you, I have done my research after our last conversation on discord. My users don't want to know how the website is made. They care about reliable service, mostly because they're looking for alternative to imgur/photobucket/flickr or similar services where they are unsatisfied. Also, announcing that you don't have control over the website code, actually diminishes the value of service. I tried with select group, A/B testing, and group which didn't know it was based on chevereto, actually ended up donating money to us. I am not making banks, and I am not planning to. I just want to sustain the service, and end goal is to have enough donations to cover server bills, in order to sustain the service. I am actually doing it to learn how to optimize and scale infrastructure on larger user base. It is my little side experiment to teach myself. And for that I need my user base to grow.
I may regret writing this, because no one else said anything about it. But, here you go.
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