Why do I support thirtybees on Patreon and why you should do too

[cprats]

I've just signed up with Patreon to support the thirtybees project.

I don't know the developers, I am not a friend or a relative of them, I am just an e-commerce owner who was tired of Prestashop's continuous issues and troubles, and lack of attention in their forum when problems arose. I didn't want to update to PS1.7 because most of my modules would have stopped working. So more than a year ago I decided to try thirtybees. And I found it was lovely: no problems, fast response with the very few issues I had, even developers offering themselves to arrange things in my own server side, developers interacting with users in the forum.

We all want everything for free, but if we have an e-commerce it's because we have a business, so we make profits thanks, also, to the work behind thirtybees. And we all want improvements and updates, and bugs fixed, and things working. The most honest thing we can do is to pay for the excellent service we receive. So, I encourage you to support thirtybees here, and it starts as low as $5/mo:

https://www.patreon.com/thirtybees/posts?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=tyshare2

Think about this: changing your PS1.6 modules for PS1.7 ones would have cost you a fortune. Thirtybees has saved you a lot of money. Sharing this benefit with thirtybees is not just a good idea, but a profitable investment for we all: thirtybees will continue improving. And of course, it also a way to say "thank-you!".

[wakabayashi]

Thanks for your post! Thats exactly how I think about it, too!

[AndyC]

I was supporting Thirty Bees ,but swapping over to TB has wiped out my sales revenue for now.Partly because I was forced to move due to a major zencart issues.Although in saying that I will start again as soon as I am able to.

[Briljander]

I agree.

I have been supporting this project since TB started with Patreon although my liveshop still runs Prestashop. 

Still a little bit concerned that a lot of my modules doesn't support TB.

Do only add $5 to the table right now but I do think everyone using TB should give something back to the project and hopefully we would have even faster development.

I will probably step up a level when changing and hope more people can contribute.

[datakick]

Fast forward two months. Number of patrons dropped down to 22, and total amount pledged dropped from $670 to $195. That is encouraging. 

[wakabayashi]

@datakick It was surely not helpful to announce an inhouse solution and then still stick to patreons. But why such a huge drop can happen, is still mysterious to me.

[AndyC]

I had to stop mine as about to go into negative balance 😞.. Haven't made a sale since I started with TB 😞

[wakabayashi]

58 minutes ago, AndyC said:

I had to stop mine as about to go into negative balance 😞.. Haven't made a sale since I started with TB 😞

I am sorry to hear that and understand ofc that you stopped for the moment 😞

[Briljander]

Can't everyone that runs a e-commerce afford at least $5 a month?

Maybe you should try another pricing model anyway. 

Give something extra (modules or features?) to those bringing something  to the table?

[AndyC]

6 minutes ago, Briljander said:

Give something extra (modules or features?) to those bringing something  to the table?

They did... There is a module out there only for patrons.. I didn't get the update as I had stopped before that. I made a promise to my wife I would keep business separate.. Google is just swallowing up what's left and seems to be cutting me out of google shopping already, so don't know if it's TB or Google.. Doesn't really matter now though as by the end of the month I'll have to stop it anyway and try get sales any other way 

 

[wakabayashi]

36 minutes ago, Briljander said:

Give something extra (modules or features?) to those bringing something  to the table?

I have tried that: 

But not many people were interested in it. Maybe it would help if patreon can influence, where tb is heading and what has priority. But it's anyway up to the officials of tb. If they can generate other revenue streams, it's ok too 🙂

[led24ee]

Not supporters ... Let me think .... For example You can put all patreons in supporters file.

[Briljander]

But how many are using TB? 

I know you did @wakabayashi but there is nothing official like a premium where you get more.

But I don't know if that's the best option either but this project has been going on for some years now and I appreciate the hard work from the guys but for my own sake I would like this project to fly and get more revenue and get more broadly accepted by module developers.

Thats my biggest concern, I don't dare to change to something that's not supported by my module developers cause then I will loose all official support even though the codebase might be the same. It's to fragile as of know to rely a whole business on. It's still much much more accepted to have a 1.6 Prestashop than TB, unfortunately.

But at the end there will be a choice for me too, 1.7 or TB.

 

 

[SLiCK_303]

@Briljander, I'm too lazy to figure out how to multi-qoute, so I'll just do numbers for each of your paragraphs.

 

1. a lot I imagine, I do, and so should you...  😉
2. it's not about getting more, it's about giving a little support, to the people who help you make money.
3. agreed
4. help by getting your developers onboard with tb, if enough people ask for support for it, they will give it.  Also, I certainly wouldnt say ps is more accepted than tb, but rather more common.
5. thats an easy choice, 1.7 sux in soooo many ways, tb is far superior to ps no matter the version at this point.

 

[lesley]

I guess its time for another one of these posts. 

 

@wakabayashi The reason I never launched the inhouse solution / alternative to patreon is that I do not trust wordpress. I bought a plugin called give for wordpress, We paid a couple hundred US for for it. But the amount of attacks we get to our site is staggering for some reason. The marketplace, running thirty bees, its fine, there are no exploits in thirty bees. Our main site running wordpress, I don't trust it as much. I don't trust it enough to store payment tokens for people in the community. On any given day We get about 2-3k admin login attempts. We block after 2 failed logins. I liked the thought of paying less fees, but honestly, I am not willing to give up security over that. I have scrapped the plan of using that module.

 

@datakick Its the ebb and flow of things. We lost 2 donors. That does suck, but we also picked up 4 direct donors as well, it evens itself out in the end.

 

We are all thankful here at thirty bees for everyone that believes in what we are doing and chooses to either run your shop on thirty bees or donate to the project. We have actually started turning a bit of revenue in the past 6 months, so we are not solely dependent on the patreon. We have done this without selling your information, constantly bombarding you with ads, or removing features from our software and selling them back to you.

Things are actually progressing pretty well. We have a couple hired developers helping fix bugs, we are working on a new back office redesign, and some new modules. The future is pretty bright from where I sit.