Price of Pinephone is going to increase by $100?

[displacefish]

In my opinion, volunteer software projects are the biggest strength of pinephone development -
without voluntary development, there would be nothing.

I'm not suggesting replacing volunteer development, only supporting and enhancing it. Nor am I suggesting "hiring" full-time developers or anything, only providing extra support to give them the freedom to e.g. work on the pinephone part-time, if they choose, because now it would make financial sense to do so.

You can directly donate $100 to the developers of your choice, or buy Librem 5, which includes software development in its price.

While I surely can, and I probably wouldn't be the only one to do so, the vast majority of people might not even consider this. While if this was an option in the official store - even just an option; have the current $150 price point be still available - a lot more people might stop to think, "good point, do I want to support the development more?" (after all, supporting linux-on-phone is the primary reason to get a pinephone in the first place).
The Librem is significantly more expensive than even $250, and additionally they are doing their software completely in-house (as far as I'm aware), without any meaningful community participation. Like @Juergen said above, the voluntary community involvement is irreplaceable.


Overall, I'm of course not sure if it would be feasible logistically. But I wonder if Pine ever considered something like this.

[fsflover]

if this was an option in the official store - even just an option; have the current $150 price point be still available - a lot more people might stop to think, "good point, do I want to support the development more?" (after all, supporting linux-on-phone is the primary reason to get a pinephone in the first place).

I don't think it is so simple. The Pinephone wiki has links to the development communities, so one could find their favorite developers and donate to them. If there was an option in the Pine64 store, they would have to make sure not a single OS is missing, which is a very hard task. Otherwise it will look unfair. Also they will have to manage the money transfer to them all...

The Librem is significantly more expensive than even $250, and additionally they are doing their software completely in-house (as far as I'm aware), without any meaningful community participation. Like @Juergen said above, the voluntary community involvement is irreplaceable.

Purism definitely accept contributions from the community, both in the form of a pull requests and help with development of alternative operating systems. They upstream all their changes to the kernel and write posts about it regularly.

[gamerminstrel]

Just in case newcomers jump in on this; If you read the latest blog entry, they have revealed that the prices on pine64.com will NOT be going up ever. They are instead looking into letting other online, more local retailers sell inventory at the increased prices.

The profits made from the increased cost would go toward providing those stores the means to provide customer service on a scale hopefully much more fitting to the amount of sales Pine64 has been making. So you can pick between getting the best deal ($150 @pinestore.com), or pay the higher price ($250 @other-stores) for customer support. They make it sound like they're working toward offering basic tech support even, and maybe other perks to try to sweeten the deal.

[KC9UDX]

It's pretty ingenious. This will take the "support" load off of whomever is doing it now; whomever it is, is not keeping up. This will hopefully mean that @tllim isn't burdened with personally resolving all the open issues.

So it'll be a win for Pine64, a win for the retailers*, and a win for the support-needing purchasers.

*until @LinAdmin2 catches up with them.