I guess the obvious question (excuse me if this has been asked before) is what about Patreon for subscribers?
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Patreon uses PayPal as their payment processor.
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Are you sure? I thought PayPal was just one of the options patrons could use if they choose to. The point being they also support Credit Cards, Apple Pay etc etc. I just thought it might be less administrative work for you and more flexible for subscribers to manage their subscriptions.
I believe that is actually a change from what it used to be. Not sure when the change happened, but they used to use Paypal for all payment processing (Including credit cards in a similar fashion to how ardour.org uses it), and you had to have Paypal to pay out from Patreon to the supported project. I believe now you have more options, and unlike previously I do not believe they use Paypal under the hood for all of them anymore.
I also do not understand how people get upset at Paypal but have no issues with having a bank account at ING, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America, Commerzbank, ABN AMRO.
You can literally just type “<any bank name> scandal” into a web search engine…
and most search results do not even include the bailouts during the 2008 crisis.
I do not want to defend Paypal, but simply point out even the alternatives are just more of the same.
Please mail gold ingots to subscribe 
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Not knowing anything, but that’s interesting
All I know, from a personal perspective, is it’s a shame the Ardour team doesn’t offer an alternative. I thought multiple times this week about either donating, paying a one-off for v7 or subscribing but then I remembered I couldn’t.
Ardour is set apart because of it’s ethical license etc so why not pick a more ethical payment system even if at the expense of a little less income due to fees? I’m sure users would gladly pay a little more to offset this.
And, as a side note, I’m sorry @mike3 that you are being spoken to the way you are here on this forum. You’ve raised great points about plugin window closing, payment systems and more. It behooves the admin to think more carefully about their choice of words and reactions to honest feedback and discussion.
Probably this question should be framed a bit otherwise to keep perspective.
So suppose now that in the country you live the government decides go on a way that you dislike, politicians engage in mischief and makes you baffled and disillusioned. Now, what other truly better countries (or planets) are there to choose to feasibly relocate to? Will you seriously think in relocating to another country? Probably not, and you will live with the mess, because at the end that mess is still much better and still not that worse than in any other countries, or just the relocating is beyond your means – and you can still enjoy and appreciate your life and other gifts given to you with faith, or even without faith.
Probably the option you dislike from one point of view may show up still the best after weighting up everything.
(At the end you can’t relocate from planet Earth, so you have to look for other solutions to correct the system.)
It would be a vastly different FLOSS world if there were more people like you Mika! If instead of 99% of people not donating anything like… ever, If we had even 25-30% of people doing regular microdonations to a handful of their commonly used FLOSS products Microsoft and Apple wouldn’t know what hit them…
The developers would be encouraged to keep on, they would have some money for hardware either for testing or developing and some of them could switch from bedroom/basement hobby to full-time occupation. And most of the donators in the developed world at least wouldn’t even miss the money… We’re talking the amount of a cup of coffee or an extra beer at the pub…
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It would be great if you could get a 25% - 30% conversion rate on anything! It seems the commonly accepted figure is in the low single digits for conversions on any product - largely irrespective of market sector. So if you’re selling something online you should probably assume that on average only 5% of your traffic at best will convert to paying customers. In some cases 2% might be closer to the truth.
If this happens at each significant decision process in the ‘funnel’ then you can see how you go from ‘the world’ to ‘a very few people’ very fast. The biggest mistake people make (and I’ve seen it happen) is the assumption that everyone in their target market will become a customer.
In terms of donationware (and I released my software as donationware 15 years or more ago when I first published a few Linux JACK ‘plugins’) my experience was that the software was well liked, but approx 50% of people didn’t donate because they thought nobody else had (so why should they), and the other 50% didn’t donate because they assumed everyone else had (so they didn’t need to)
But - there is actually a ‘behavioural engineering’ element to successful donationware, intentionally or not.
For example, if you publish a finished work, that’s feature and functionally complete it seems more difficult to entice people to donate (they don’t need to support future development it completely works).
If you publish something that’s completely broken or unusable, people tend not to donate because its just not very good. More effective it seems, is to create something which works ‘just well enough’ - that it has potential and is tantalisingly usable, but would be better for having the support of donations (and future development) ‘Its nearly finished’.
Equally, if you ask for donations via a paypal button and an anonymous download, while most are decent people and would like to do the right thing, if its an anonymous process, its too tempting to just take the free download (no-one ‘sees’ you do it) and “maybe I’ll donate something later…” - which, with the best of intentions tends not to happen (some distraction occurs or whatever).
Conversely if you ask for something identifiable - even if you never use or store it - perhaps you say ‘please sign up with your email address so we can send you the download link’ there’s a subconscious trigger that ‘someone somewhere might know I didn’t pay’ - even though that’s completely permitted -and it can act as that uncomfortable phrase “a nudge” to donate. Think of it like the virtual equivalent of the ‘honesty box’ I guess. What I’m getting to is that how you set up the system is absolutely key to whether it’s successful or not.
If you got this far, thanks for reading my totally amateur thesis on SEO (it is however based on some personal experience over the last 15 years of trying to run an online business - and yes I did naively assume that 100% conversion rate was of course completely feasible - all you need is a good product, right? )
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I understand and agree with your point for the most part and we are getting off-topic… I think where your numbers possibly go a bit amiss is I’m not talking about potential customer retention I’m talking about people already using the software on a daily basis which doesn’t exist in the retail world unless people are using warez software or there are multiple users on a single persons account etc etc.
AV Linux as an example is a tiny niche, I’m not talking about 25% of people who see it or try it and don’t like it and install something else within a week… I’m talking about 25% of reasonably long term regular already daily users making a microdonation, not even a ‘donation’… like a dollar or two en masse would be a game changer for many projects.
I would say that probably it is hard to make a sale if you do not provide payment/donations options in your software via nag screens, and if you do not provide some useful extra “gentleman edition” features and status for the users after the payment. (And if your demo does not really help or actually hinders the potential user to getting accustomed to it, and find its place on the long run.)
The TDR guys’ “Gentlemen Edition” thing is a work of genius. You don’t just donate and buy some features, you actually also buy and get “Gentlemen” status for your ego and self-image and you are constantly reminded of that on the plugin UI once you purchased. Brilliant!
Reaper’s nag screen also a good one.
And they made software piracy redundant in their own case.
If only it wasn’t so sexist.
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I see and understand it the following way:
man = human being
gentle = honorable
gentleman = honorable human being
Well, the way you understand it is quite unique and doesn’t match any of the dictionary definitions of the word “gentleman”.
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Also we can innovate and rectify things instead of saying that it is sexists or it does not match any current definitions in any dictionary. If you check it parts “gentle” + “man” and you redo the calculation you may get other interesting results, different from the one you grown into.
Anyways, you can still contemplate on the main idea which is in my opinion brilliant. Or you can propose an alternative one.
No, I’m afraid not. “Gentleman’s Edition” is quite clear in its implications. It’s impossible to re-frame it otherwise. Problematic for 2022, without a doubt.
My original suggestion still stands – why not have other payment options for people who want to give one-off payments or donations? Even bump up the price a little to compensate for higher fees.
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Paul mentioned it many times, if I’m right, it is not just the price but the disproportionate increase in administrative work. Who would to that?
And suppose that via Paypal you have to pay US$45 and with something else US$65 then how does this look?
Maybe the TDR guys made a edition for Gentleman (musician) - Wikipedia
Anyway, I can assure you that Ardour will remain an inclusive project without discrimination against any person or group of persons nor against any field of endeavor.
As for discussing terms used by other vendors which may or may not be politically incorrect, I would ask you to please discuss this elsewhere.
I understand that @Attila_S mainly wanted convey the the idea to provide a “premium edition”. This is not something we are interested in, mainly because it can lead to incompatibilities when exchanging sessions.
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