DavidP

@wakabayashi ah okies, I missed that bit about the store as I only read a few posts :) The 1000$/month isn't quite the issue, the company I work for makes over 20x this a month (@dynambee this would put us on the $249 a month plan on BigCommerce) but their viewpoint is they're paying me to provide the website support / service so I've got to justify expenses to them for ROI, it was a hard fight getting 3 months SemRush use! If you're on 1000$ a month then you're fine with the likes of Wix and Weebly tbh. The fact my company makes 20x that amount though doesn't mean they're making a lot of money because from that there's building running costs, my wages plus two others, product costs, transport costs, storage costs plus other business costs. I couldn't justify spending $35k a year on the OroCommerce solution even if it provides us with the necessary requirements. The Magento cost of M2 isn't just because of Ebay, it's because they've now got investors who want a return on their investment. Ebay started it off but it's gone well beyond their plans of how to make money. It serves their investers to make the open commerce version of M2 a pile of crap. OroCommerce see that as a good plan and also introduced a similar version of crap free with good paid solution. Be careful on the free or paid cloud version approach, Magento tried that with Magento Go and that didn't work out too well for them!

@dynambee that's why I stated $20-30 with no support and being able to buy support hours at $$ - there's still the community to help you out with advice so you only pay for the hours if need be. In fact the jobs board could be used for people to offer their services on the support, like the people per hour platform. The thing about Shopify though is it's hosted by them and not self-hosted, which is part of their cost. Shopify also suffers from the problem of most the modules being a monthly subscription as well so you can easily get into the $200 a month for many features. The other problem with Shopify and many platforms out there is that the software itself is very basic; getting something that can do advanced stock management with multiple warehouses, volume discounts on product combinations, loyalty discounts & offers and multiple currencies / languages is very costly (I've looked a lot and the closest you're going to get is PrestaShop 1.6 even if it is broken). TB has got a good base for all of this with most of it fixed and could surpass all those other solutions. With regards to the Patreon thing, it's also a very short term viewpoint - you want to hire 1 developer on an OK wage, what happens when he wants holidays or goes off sick, who stands in? What happens when the work is too much for him and you need other developers, do they get a cut of his pay or do they work for free? TB may have started out as a nice project due to PS dropping it but it needs to be run as a viable business because merchants want stability, they don't want to invest in something that they don't know is going to be around in a years time - Patreon is not a viable business plan. @lesley forgive me here, but I don't understand how an affiliate channel will bring in money if TB is free, what exactly are they selling? Also for the store, again, I'm not sure what it is that's being sold, is it the mugs etc from the demo store? When you say 'once the store is up and running' - it's been 10 months since TB was announced, what's preventing the store from already being live?

I agree with @Traumflug that open source is not free source, people have to spend time and money on these things. With Patreon though you're introducing a subscription service whereby some pay and some don't. Either introduce an overall subscription service or find another form of making money because people won't like paying for something when others don't. PrestaShop survives from large investments, a support service and taking a large cut from modules - with the 1.7 they've removed a lot of functionality from the core, which will be catered for by paid modules. The problem they've got is 1.7 is riddled with bugs from various platforms like symfony, bootstrap and js libraries being hacked into it in a piecemeal attitude so it's just a mess. The main thing though is they don't care about the quality of the software as long as they make money from it. Other open source comparable solutions are just crap TBH, Magento 2 open source pales in comparison to the cloud / enterprise edition and no amount of modules will ever make it as good as them - that's their intention, they made that mistake on Magento 1 and they won't make the same mistake again. OroCommerce, which is from the founders of Magento focuses heavily on B2B though is still in it's infancy. It also has an open source free edition, which is also very limited and not worth looking at as you'll soon hit a bottleneck - both these platforms are like $20-35k per anum just to get started on the good quality software! Shopify has a reasonable paid service but the good features are in their more expensive solutions at £300 ish a month then you need to spend monthly subscriptions on various modules, which can easily bring you up to the $20k a year for your store. There's other solutions out there like WooCommerce, Joomla, Drupal, BigCommerce, 3Dcart, Pinnacle cart, volusion and others I've forgot and I've looked at them all as an alternative to PrestaShop 1.6 and unless you're willing to spend big $$ you're going to get crap support / software. With all that's available there is a gap in the market for a platform that's subscription based of around $20 to $30 a month for the software licence where the main features / modules that people need aren't expensive but are covered by this fee and the modules you need to buy are not mega expensive and don't cost a fortune to own. Thirty Bees could easily fill this gap and be one of the best low cost solutions available as PrestaShop 1.6 is a fairly good platform and far superior to many of the other offerings available. You just need to sort out a fair pricing model and I've even go as far as stating you might want to hire a business manager to set it up. Everyone wants TB to work but at the moment you don't know how to make it work in the long term and that's what's worrying a lot of people. If I could afford 35k a year I'd go for OroCommerce or Magento 2 but I can't as can't thousands of others but I can afford $300-$400 a year so you such pitch TB along these lines and forget about this 'a few $ here and there' to keep you tiding over.

I'd like to add my own comment here. Firstly, I had deleted all my previous posts and content because I basically got pissed off with @Traumflug and others about their viewpoint that this community is to serve users of TB and not to serve merchants - people were asking valid merchant questions that he deemed off topic for these forums. Anyhow, I've been watching the posts to keep an eye on the project and felt strongly enough about this post to re-activate to give my viewpoint. I paid into the Elastic search module $75 because I felt it was worthwhile. I was concerned it took so long to develop and when it did come out it was useless to me on a shared server. I know there's been various versions since but I've not bothered looking at it as I feel TB still isn't good enough to switch to from PS. The point I'm trying to get to is this... people shouldn't expect a free ride, if you want the software I think it's more than fair enough to pay for it BUT the reason why I and probably many others haven't taken the plunge is because you've got no business plan - you've tried the coin hive thing, you've tried paying for making modules and now this Patreon thing yet there's still no 'this is what we're going to give'... On PrestaShop they've got a dire 1.7 that seems to be getting worse but their plan to make money is to make you pay for it from modules. Lots of open source platforms do this. On the flip side here, you've got what seems to be 1 dedicated developer who is still tinkering with the elastic search, other devs who you don't know what are doing and no plan in place other than 'we're fixing the modules, tidying up some stats modules, fixing this or that'. If you want this Patreon thing to work you need a clear plan of who the developers are, what happens if @mdekker suddenly decides he's had enough, does that mean TB ends? What the other devs get paid if anything? And also as @Traumflug pointed out in another post about the warehouse theme guy using WooCommerce because it was easy to setup - TB needs to just be installable, no 'you've got to do this, that or whatever' to make it work. The way it seems to be going is TB will be a paid service not open source, which in my mind is a good thing, $20 a month gets you lifetime support - it's cheap enough for everyone and you know what you're signing up for, none of this 'pay this to get this or whatever'. Bottom line, forget about all the bells and whistles stuff, just get it working so it works on everyone's platforms and make it a subscription service, only then move onto nice new stuff to add.