Project sustainability plan

[Xe]

Hey all,

This project has been exploding as of late and I want to start figuring out the sustainability plans sooner rather than later. I think the best way forward is to do a combination of individual and corporate sponsorship.

First, I just want to thank you all for the contributions, well wishes, and more. It's made a huge difference and helped offset some of the anxieties I've been feeling because gestures at the world.

I want to model this in three phases:

Phase 1: $0-5000 USD per month (where we are now)

Anubis is a side project, it's something I will keep an eye on and focus on during nights and weekends, but it's not the main thing I focus on. I'm still doing my dayjob, and I'm working on features as the need arises. The overall plan is to make it easy to set up, easy to understand, but still hackable for administrators.

Other key features I'm working on in this phase:

• WebAssembly-based checker logic Port checker to WASM #240
• Documentation fixes, etc
• Figure out the plan for how to do corporate sponsorship ethically
• Package repositories
• Integrate anubis into existing software like Caddy, Nginx, and Traefik

A lot of this is to get growth and hype.

Phase 2: $5000-10000 USD per month

At this point I'll be able to reduce hours at my job to part time or quit it in favor of part time contracting. I'll be able to devote at least two work days per week to Anubis.

This is the phase where I'd start putting solid effort into Privacy Pass (#119) or a "no javascript" approach to the proof-of-work checkers (this would involve building a browser extension, getting extensions into the chrome marketplace and testing them is a huge pain).

I'd also start building up the integration jungle and writing / making videos about the hard problems involved with that.

I'll also be working with corporations and larger users to do paid consulting including features like custom branding, or dynamically generated challenge logic based on an array of checkers in order to make bypasses/offloading harder.

Phase 3: $10000 USD per month or more

This is when I'd be able to put my full-time focus into Anubis and the related infrastructure. My needs would be met and I would be able to largely be financially independent. This is when I would implement features like this in the open source repo:

• Custom images chosen by administrators
• Custom branding
• Enterprise integrations (in whatever form that takes)

How to donate

Right now the best place to donate to the project is on Patreon or GitHub Sponsors. I'm working on other approaches.

Corporate-friendly / unbranded version

I am working on a corporate-friendly / unbranded version called BotStopper. BotStopper will also have custom branding, overridable images, and other things that corporations would want. This is still a work in progress but updates will be available soon. Initially BotStopper will be distributed as a multi-architecture Docker image.

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My TODO list:

• OpenCollective once the corporation is finished being founded (hard dependency: lawyers, things are complicated, I don't want to get into the details)
• Investigate other ways to get funding, NLNET maybe?
• Get in contact with UNESCO to see what their experience has been like

[Xe]

I set up GitHub sponsors: https://github.com/sponsors/Xe, OpenCollective has to wait until next month.