> Any update on how the money was spent?

So this is only 1/3 of the Kickstarter to date. The two stretch goals are planned as releases 3.1 and 3.2.

We were significantly overfunded, and I'll treat the extra time/budget flexibly depending on whatever seems highest priority, but it's mostly going towards ensuring I've got headroom for keeping the quality bar super high. (Plus extra time available for general support, triage, etc...)

For transparency I plan to be ending up with treating 10% of the amount received as profit - the rest of the funding is simply covering the costs for the time I'm not working on client projects at DabApps (minus Kickstarter's cut and some taxes of course).

I probably won't give a full time-spent breakout of how long each task has taken, I've not had requests from backers to do that, and not doing so frees me up to spend it however I think best without feeling like I need to justify things on a blow-by-blow basis.

Sounds like a sound plan.

For those wondering why I asked: I wanted to know. Less flippantly (but no less true) -- I'm interested in both successful and failing Kickstarters for Free/open software: It's a tricky business. You ask people to give you money, and in return you'll give them a metaphorical song -- and a token. No-one (I would hope) really thinks the "token" is worth wath they spend -- so it's very interesting to see how backers feel about decisions that are made, in cases like this, when a goal is significantly over-achieved.

There are many options: continue working on the code, if that makes sense; donate to something related (eg: python foundation in this case?) -- or simply keeping the money, as a pat on the back of sorts.

I don't have any issues with any of those options -- but they can be potential thorny decisions -- especially when one hasn't planned for "irrational success" (and come up with a suitable "stretch goal" or plan, like: 10MUSD: I'll go into space ;-) before hand.

I guess from my side it feels like it's something of a different business relationship to the usual case. There's enough trust from backers that over-funding will ensure a better product, even when the details of that are underspecified.

I wouldn't particularly mind things being more nailed down, eg "Here's my day rate, and you'll get weekly updates" but there's still a bit of a sense that OSS development needs to be apologetic for being properly sustainable, and it is awkward to navigate that you know stacks of people who're also putting in hard work, and not having the privilege of being paid to do so in working hours.

I think there's also a trade off - not having to justify decisions case-by-case does mean that I can just focus on stuff done, however I think that's best spent.

I also think we need to redefine our expectations. The amount of money this project raised on Kickstarter is huge by OSS standards, but in terms of business investment it's actually what I'd consider a sensible amount, and I'd hope to see it become more normalized. If you look how an individual backing compares to contractor day rates, the investment most of our backers are making is clearly worth the deliverable they're getting at the end of it.

I very much agree with this. I like to think of a KS as a sort of market research: do people want/need this? And people spend/give some amount they're comfortable with spending. If I spent, say a hundred dollars, and got a sticker and a open source piece of software that I needed -- that's great value! If the author(s) suddenly became independently wealthy, I'd think that was great! Keep doing good stuff!

(I'm obviously extrapolating here, this KS went nowhere as far -- but successful (as in: funded, and delivered) KS' are always interesting IMHO).

Seems pretty clear from that linked post: Tom is going to use/used the money to support his time spent working on the project. And extra funds will be used/have been used to devote more time than he'd otherwise be able to spend.

So why are you asking?