.. post:: May 1, 2015 :tags: funding, open source :author: Anthony
First off, a big ol' thank you is in order for everyone that helped support us. You all helped us hit our funding goal, and with time to spare. We're humbled to have such an abundance of support, and to know so many people share our vision for great documentation.
Really, thank you all. ❤
We started the fund raise drive at the beginning of PyCon, and in a little under 3 weeks you were able to bring us up to our funding goal of $24,000. With the end of April, we've wrapped up fundraising for now. You can still contribute however, and give us a head start on our next fund raising goal.
We set our goal to cover support costs for the next 3 months, and to set Read the Docs on a path to becoming self-sustaining. It will allow us to dedicate time to supporting and maintaining the service as it continues to grow.
So far, we've had 157 contributions, and we couldn't have hit our goal without the help of everyone. The Python Software Foundation graciously provided us with a grant for $8,000 to go towards the continued support efforts. Our largest corporate sponsors include Twilio, Sentry, DreamHost, and Lincoln Loop. Additionally, we have received generous service sponsorships from Elastic Search, MaxCDN, and Gandi.
Again, a huge thank you to everyone that made this happen!
We are building a company around an open source service, and we strive to remain open about what we're doing. As a first step, we will be documenting how our time is used up and how we are allocating funds for the costs. We will be providing updates on our public Trello board, we welcome you to subscribe for updates and to provide us with feedback.
The funds will go towards covering the support and maintenance costs of Read the Docs each week. We want to increase our capacity to handle support requests by working with someone on a part-time contract basis, working solely on managing this support burden.
Each week, the funds will pay for up to 40 hours of time spent supporting the service. We look to cover triaging support requests and operations maintenance and emergency support with this time. Time will be split up between several engineers, we hope to cover part of the week with our time and the majority of the time each week with a third set of hands. Development will continue as a community supported mechanism, with the time of the core team donated to the project.