[filmgirlcw]

Yeah, but a lot of employers would still bristle at $180 a year (if you pay in advance) for a souped up version of dev tools. Not to mention that most places that would have a budget for something like this would need to do a security audit of anything like this.

If you’re a consultant or have a lot of client projects, you can absolutely bill the client for this sort of thing. But that’s not the situation for everyone and certainly doesn’t strike me as the audience being targeted by the landing page.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

My current employer gives all engineers $1000/year to spend on tooling. We just expense it and it's automatically approved, up to a grand. No arguments the budget, no manager approval required, nothing.

Were way more efficient than any other place I've worked, all because we're empowered to buy little $10/month plugins that save boatloads of time.

[sroussey]

Back in the day, we had requested donations for Firebug (which had millions of installs) and the revenue was embarrassingly pathetic. We used it to give contributors in non-western countries some bonuses from time to time.

[zerocrates]

There you're taking the already high-ish barrier for devs to pay for tools, as discussed elsewhere in this thread, and adding on the really high barrier to get people to donate to things they can use for free.

[sroussey]

True, but there was a high barrier to entry to just install it. And for a long time there was little else you could use.

On the other hand, it was free and more important to get people to use it and be more productive then generate revenue.

[zerocrates]

Not criticizing Firebug, aboslutely. Just speaking to the challenges of trying to run on individual donations.