Funding Heptapod
Heptapod is an Open Source piece of software that requires a significant development effort to stay up to date and to move forward. It has been historically funded by a limited number of sponsors, the first and foremost being Octobus, where the adventure started.
In March 2024, Heptapod development has been adopted by Cloudcrane, as part of the Orbeet portfolio. This means that the development costs are now supported by us, Cloudcrane, and we cover them by providing several ways of funding Heptapod, with additional benefits for you.
Cloudrane offers support, hosting and the possibility to sponsor features.
Support contracts and managed instances
If you are running Heptapod in production for an active team of developers, you might be interested in getting support from the development team, in particular to help with version upgrades. We provide contracts covering all of that.
Cloudcrane can also host a private Heptapod for you, on our infrastructure or on your own (with technical requirements). Providing fully managed applications for our customers is after all our core business.
Feel free to email us if you are interested by these services.
Sponsoring features
A simple categorization
All the work that can be done in Heptapod is recorded as issues in its own instance. Those that can be the object of a direct sponsorship are marked with dedicated "Sponsorable" labels that encode the monetary amount required to implement them.
For example, issues with the Sponsorable 1 label can be sponsored for €1000 (excluding tax), those with Sponsorable 2 for €2000, etc.
How to sponsor
For now, to sponsor an issue, please email us about it.
We're thinking about making issue sponsorsphips digital products that can be simply ordered from our website, but that is not in place as of this writing yet.
Our current opinion is that each issue should be sponsored by a single actor, the point being that this system should be simple and straightforward. If you think of a particular one for which some kind of alliance would be in order, please reach out to us. It is possible that we would just split it in several smaller pieces.
The process
Once the sponsorship for an issue has been received, the issue is marked as "Sponsored" and development can start, with the aim of including it in the next minor version (x.y).
Unless you do not want the publicity, your sponsorship is displayed on the issue and potentially in the sponsors page, the changelog etc.
As it is always the case with software development, it is possible that our initial estimation has to be adjusted, perhaps because the software environment changed since then, perhaps for unforeseen reasons. If that were to happen, we will upgrade the sponsorship amount and get back to you as soon as possible. If the new amount does not suit you, you'll be refunded and the issue will be put back in store with the appropriate "Sponsorable" label. We will of course do our best so that such circumstances stay exceptional.
If too many issue sponsorships happen at the same time for inclusion in the next minor version, we will reach out to you to make a schedule.