PBP Pricing

[fire219]

Greetings!

I saw a post a few days ago commenting that the preorder PBP's were being sold at-cost as a thank you to community members (or something to that effect).  This brought 2 questions to my mind:

1: Are you planning on raising the price of the PBP once you open it up to the general public?
2: If not, how is the Pine64 project sustained?  While I'm all for low prices, "don't be evil" philosophies, and philanthropic tendencies, I also recognize that you guys need to make SOME sort of money in order to sustain the project.  Where do those funds come from?

1. Nope! It is staying at $199.
2. The following except from an AmeriDroid article explains a big part of it fairly well:

PINE64 was set up as a community of developers and users to define the direction of the technology with three defining financial principles from the onset and into the future:


1. No venture capital funding
2. No debt
3. No stock IPO

PINE64 has zero employees. All development comes from contractors or contributors.

PINE64 is not a product development company. It is a community that develops products.

The only parts of this equation that require real funding is the servers the infrastructure run on, the hardware design, and manufacturing. That funding comes from whatever small profits there are on sales of certain products (not all of them even make a profit though -- Pinebook and Pinebook Pro are sold at-cost!).