What is this post about?
At the end of each month, we publish a report for patrons on the status of the project and the work done that month.
There is no guarantee that we will be able to spend much time on the project each month, but overall we hope that this will give more transparency to the people supporting the project.
Progress Report for December 2023.
This month we spent a total of 14 hours working on the project, excluding time spent on user support.
Most of the time was spent releasing an urgent fix for problems that surfaced on the coomeet free platform. This platform had a slight change in the way its interface works, which caused the extension to stop working on it at all.
The features of the extension include recognizing bots on that platform and the country of the person you are talking to, without which it is almost impossible to use that video chat service.
That platform shamelessly uses short clips of recorded conversations of its users to keep people on the site while the site searches for a real conversation partner! Imagine you can't realize you're talking to a fake person every time you meet someone in the chat. It must be unpleasant.
In any case, I've investigated what exactly has changed in the interface and logic and released a patch update ASAP to restore full functionality. It still took much longer time than I expected.
We also had an incident with our server on December 30th, which caused the patron's geolocation service to be paralyzed for about 20 minutes. It took some time to look into the issue and restore the functionality. We can't afford a more expensive server yet and will be looking for ways to work around the problem we identified on the software side in the future.
But I expected more?
There were plans to do much more this month, but the only free week I had I spent working 12 hours / day on a project for a small hacker competition. I ended up winning only ~180$ per 80 hours of work, but it was still a fun experience.
Unfortunately this event has taken all of my energy and no one is able to do the development and move things forward on this project but me.
I decided that spending the rest of Christmas doing this project wasn't the best idea, so I apologize if I didn't meet your expectations, but I hope you had a good time.
What's next?
Thanks to your support, we have already stopped losing money, but the profit from Patreon after all operational costs, taxes and fees is not enough to even pay for one hour of work of a skilled developer. And I’m not even talking about myself, but about the fact that I can’t hire anyone to work on a project in those moments when I’m exhausted.
In the coming months I should be able to devote 10-15 hours a month to this project, but we will focus it specifically on various features for paid subscribers, without any special functionality for free users. Because if we don't get at least 100 $4 members by the end of 2025, I simply can't justify committing much development time and this project will go into maintenance mode, meaning only fixing unexpected issues and bugs.
I hope you enjoy the new functionality that I have planned for subscribers. it won't be something super cool (because ome obviously very limits our freedom of action), but there will be a lot of little things that you might like.
And if you have any ideas or suggestions, please, I'm begging you, share them. I truly have no idea what you need.
Anyway, I hope to see you next month!
qrlk