Futurix

I’ve been doing some accounting on Sunday and after fruitless attempts to optimise my future spending I feel that I don’t have much choice but to call for help from the users of my software

As you may have guessed while FuturixImager is free for the public – it is not free for me, the developer. I’m paying for the hosting, the development tools, the third-party code libraries, etc.
During 2009 I was unemployed for almost 6 months (until the mid-December) and my finances took a huge hit during that time – all while the costs of development and hosting grew (they are roughly 20% more than a year ago due to weak UK pound). It certainly does not help that I took a large salary cut when starting in my current job.

In the near future: February will be a particularly tough month as I will need to pay for the next 6 months of hosting (it is cheaper to pay in larger chunks of time) and renew licenses for libraries I’m using (or going to use) in Imager. Also there is a pressing need to buy an upgrade of one of the compilers I use, plus a (damn expensive!) digital certificate for code signing would be a great thing to add (at the very least to avoid Windows popping all those security warnings about unverified publisher while installing Imager). And finally my 4 year old PC appears to be in terminal stage by now (among other problems it has a weird S.M.A.R.T. disk status and last month I had to take out one of the RAM sticks due to the faults in it).

So to summarize: it would be a great help for me if at least part of those upcoming costs would be covered by kind donations from you, the user. My target/goal is £600-700 for hosting and development and £400-500 for the new PC – the former is the priority right now, but the latter might become an urgent issue suddenly.

How you can donate:

• bank transfer (from the UK, all other EU countries, US, and possibly many others)
• PayPal

  

• cheque by post (only if you are in the UK)

In any case, write me to alex@fxfp.com with any questions or suggestions (and also to get details about the list above). I really appreciate any ideas in solving this situation.

And finally – to be honest, this donation call feels rather weird for me as I never did anything like that before and I have no idea whether it will have any effect. But hundreds of thousands of people download Imager every month – so even if 0.001% of them will help, it will make a huge difference to me.

Tags: donation call, Money matters

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 2:26 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.