Beyond Donations: FUTO's Vision for a Sustainable Software Ecosystem

FUTO has two simple goals.

Number one: Produce delightful software.

The software we build should provide a welcome contrast to Silicon Valley corporations packed with ads, tracking, and spyware. With our software, we will never remove features, implement ads, paywall functionality, or violate your privacy. However, this costs money, and providing high-quality products that respect users is only sustainable if we can meet our second goal.

Number two: Cultivate a culture where people pay for open software they find valuable.

We want to show the top 1% of programmers and developers that it’s possible to make a living creating good software that respects users instead of exploiting them. If we can make this work, perhaps talented developers will quit working for abusive tech megacorps and start building software that truly benefits people.

We have committed to putting a few million dollars into Immich over the next several years. We believe Immich is a fundamentally better product than both Google Photos and iCloud. Through our funding, we want to show users commercial open source consumer software can be delightful products that normal people can easily use. People deserve better than half-baked projects that never make it to completion.

We’re not interested in making products that are merely “okay for open source.” We want Immich and our other projects to be best-in-class competitors to big tech, period !

With Immich, we have heard a lot of feedback about our choice to call it a “purchase.” Many people have asked why we don’t use the word “donation” or some other language for what we are doing.

We labeled it this way as a deliberate choice. By calling it a purchase, we’re sending a message that this software is worth paying for, just like any other product you use and rely on. The results of this experiment have spoken for themselves.

In just a month after making our announcement that people can purchase Immich, the team made 5x what they previously got in donations for the lifetime of the software.

This is a massive win! We are proving that when people see value in open software, they’re willing to pay for it.

These are exactly the results what we wanted to see; it validates our approach. People have asked all sorts of questions about how our approach to monetization is sustainable, this is your answer.

For many people, sustainable open software without corporate donors may very well seem like a pipe dream. The sales data we have for Immich, FUTO Keyboard, and Grayjay shows otherwise. While these projects have not gotten past the break even point, our internal projections show that they are all making significant gains toward sustainability, and will be in the near future.

Our ambitions go well beyond just these few pieces of software. One of those ambitions is an entire app store that cultivates and brings together freedom-respecting, privacy-first software; all built on the idea that there is actual money in it.

We think it’s possible. These early wins are a first step towards making it happen. Making as much in a month as what was made in a lifetime of donations simply by asking people to “purchase” it after committing to full-time development? Amazing.

This is a direct contrast to open source donation-based business models that rarely work for consumer-facing software. Open source projects that get funding successfully often do so by becoming beholden to corporate interests, while those that shun these corporations often die from a lack of donations.

While we will continue to give grants to FOSS projects, we are under no illusions that there is a future for projects that are run this way. We are carving out a different pathway.

So far, the success we’ve seen from Immich, FUTO Keyboard, and Grayjay leads us to believe that we’re off to a great start.