What do I consider as ‘paid/sponsored AndBible development’?

Background

In September 2023, I started a private business which has main purpose of offering software development consultation services. I work with 80-100% flexible contract in my working place but can make some extra income through my company. Through this company, I also have made possible for AndBible users to sponsor AndBible development, with very affordable price of 60€ / hour.

Before Sept 2023, all AndBible development was unpaid. It was my main service to the Lord and His people, and a pleasant hobby as well. This hobby has always had a rather big price tag for me personally, as I have used approximately 1 unpaid leave / week to keep things moving. This was not an issue when I was single but when I got married in 2019, my financial needs changed. I still willingly do some voluntary work for AndBible, but I can’t do it as much as earlier.

Paid and unpaid AndBible development activities

In November, AndBible 5.0 was released. That marked a milestone in AndBible development, offering substantial and long-awaited features and improvements. In this release I also added mentions about possibility to sponsor development. Since then, contrary to earlier state, I have been privileged to do part of my AndBible development activities fully paid.

As before, I’m still doing development activities, like bug fixing and feature development. However, there’s a new additional focus, which has formerly been missing: I have had urgency to start promoting and marketing AndBible. I have started

• making short “Tips & Tricks” Youtube videos, in order to educate our users and to make our channel grow and as a consequence, bring more people to be aware of AndBible,
• being more active on our Telegram / Matrix channels,
• making paid promotions via Google Ads (paid by me).
• improving this homepage (andbible.org), adding blogging feature and
• planning to start writing blog about relevant activities every now and then.

I am not using any of “sponsored development time” for any of these marketing/advertising activities, i.e. I’m doing them completely voluntarily. Why is this, though these activities clearly are benefitting the AndBible project? This is due to dual motivation:

1. It’s purpose primarily is to make AndBible reach new user groups. This is of course part of the AndBible mission. Instead of around 60-70k users (what we currently have), we could have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users, internationally.
2. Due to new users reached and more people willing to participate in sponsoring, more of my work could be paid.

Which activities I then consider eligible to be paid AndBible development? If there is available unused sponsored time, I will use it to

• AndBible new feature development
• AndBible maintenance (bug fixing, releasing updates, etc.)
• AndBible support, via email and Github tickets or other channels

I will also use my own time, if sponsored time is not enough, or sometimes because I just want and can to use more time. I also track the time I have used to these activities and am planning to include these in a quarterly report that is released via this blog (first one, Q3/2023 is planned to be released in January). I am also tracking the time that I’m using for AndBible videos & marketing activities, but as said already, it is completely done in my own time.

I’m feeling grateful and privileged to God and all sponsors for making it possible for me to be part in the mission!