fman build system

After selling the Enterprise package to NASA in the previous month, I made it available on the purchase page (https://build-system.fman.io/pro) for other potential customers. People who want to buy fbs Pro need to self-select whether they are buying as an individual (for EUR 79), or for their company (for EUR 399). Several companies bought the Enterprise package in July, leading to EUR 2,800 of income from sales in that month, up from ~ EUR 1,000 in previous months.

NASA got in touch to buy fbs Pro, but they had some questions first for their vendor approval process. I told them that I can't go through such approval processes for fbs's cheap price of EUR 59 at the time. But I invented an "Enterprise" package for EUR 399 that includes such support. They were understandably a bit taken aback by this, but quickly became customers. I believe they are now pretty happy with fbs.

Years went by where fbs made ~EUR 2k and saw few improvements. Users (especially free users) were complaining that fbs did not support the latest Python versions. I did not want to spend the necessary development time for EUR 2k per year. So I changed the business model. Instead of making all new releases of fbs openly accessible to everyone, I introduced "fbs Pro". This is a private copy of fbs that supports the latest versions of Python and some other dependencies. I set the price at EUR 49 (one-time payment) and updated the open source version of fbs to detect if a new version of Python is being used, and tell the developer that fbs Pro is required for this. Immediately, people started to buy. Initially, it was people who had already been using the free version of fbs for a long time. But over time, there were also new customers. In the next months, fbs made more than EUR 1k per month.

fbs is for Python applications that use the Qt GUI framework. Qt was originally written in C++, but can also be used from Python. The company behind Qt ("The Qt Company") started a push to better support Python. They found that fbs solves a critical problem in this space and we had a few conversations about them acqui-hiring me. I spent quite some time improving fbs's code base and documentation to go into these conversations with a strong basis. It never lead anywhere. The Qt Company eventually decided not to pursue the deal further. They were always kind in the process, so there are no hard feelings. And my time wasn't wasted because fbs's quality significantly improved as a result.

I open sourced fbs under the GPL. This is a restrictive open source license that is not well-suited for use in commercial applications. In an attempt to make money from fbs, I created a website with a PayPal payment link that let people buy the rights to use fbs in commercial projects. The one-time payment price was EUR 400. For years, fbs generated roughly EUR 2k per year in this way.

The initial version of fman build system (fbs) scratched my own itch: I was developing a Python-based file manager (https://fman.io) at the time and found that I had to spend many weeks of development time turning my Python source code into standalone executables that my users can download. (On Windows, this would be an .exe, for example.) To help other people with this problem, I open sourced my solutions under the name "fman build system" (fbs).