Financial Support

Short story, we (make that I) need to collect enough funds to pay my bills.  If I can do this with income from Cadpage, I can continue being the full time Cadpage developer and everyone will continue to be happy.  If I can't, I have to go get "real" paying job and relegate Cadpage to a spare time hobby.  As much work as is needed to keep Cadpage running, that would lead to a serious decline if it's usability.

There is a third possibility, we could recruit enough part time volunteer developers willing to keep Cadpage on track.  We haven't had much luck doing that to date, but if you know any good Android developers who want to contribute to Cadpage, but all means send them here.

By now, most of you should be familiar with our first attempt at turning Cadpage into a friendly nagware product.  This was successful in that it brought in a lot of money.  Where it failed was in making Cadpage available to all who needed it.  Once we concluded that a lot of users were dropping Cadpage we decided a different approach was needed.

It has been suggested that we really should be collecting money from volunteer departments rather that the already overworked volunteers.  This is easier said than done, but we are trying to set up something.  If you think you can get your department to sponsor its members, send them to Other Support Options.


How things work now

Important note.  If you are getting pages from either Codemessaging.net or Active911.com you do not need to pay us.  We get some of the money that you or your department pays them.  If you are trying to pay for an Active911 subscription you should go to their web site and pay them.  We do not want you to be sending money to us.

Cadpage has Payment Status settings that shows what your current payment status is.  And the call detail dialog has a button at the bottom of the screen with the same information.   Pressing either one takes you into a menu tree where you should have the option to make a $10 contribution through the Android market.  If you make that payment, your status should change almost immediately and you have a year before we will bug you for more money.    

New users get a 30 day trial period that can be extended when needed.  If the trial period runs out, Cadpage will stop triggering on CAD pages and will instead allow them to drop through to the regular messaging app.  The calls will continue to be logged to call history and will be available if you ask purchase a subscription or just ask for a demo extension.


The 30 day demo timer actually won't start until you choose a specific location, and retain with it overnight.  Since still want to encourage users who are receiving text formats for which we are currently unsupported to request a location for them, anyone requesting a new location and following up with enough information to get it implemented is entitled to a free one year subscription.  We don't give these out automatically, you have to ask for it.  But it is available if you ask.

Cadpage will continue to take Paypal payments, but there is no advantage to using them if Android market payments work.  It's intended mainly as a backup if Android market payments don't work for some reason.  There are complications involved with processing Paypal transactions documented here.

And we will continue to hand out free subscriptions to pretty much anyone who says they can't afford them.  At least as long as the total count doesn't go much over 20% of our total subscriber base.

We kind of picked $10 as something that anyone should be able to afford.  That is really high compared to what you normally pay for other general purpose Android apps.  But Cadpage isn't a normal general purpose Android app.

  1. We put out weekly releases, and every week there are usually 10 or so location parsers that have to be fixed, either because Dispatch changed the way they send text pages, or because someone found a corner case that wasn't covered by the existing parser.  Most apps get by with a release every 3 months or more
  2. The potential user base is a tiny fraction of what a general purpose app can expect.  The percentage of the general population that responds to emergency calls is pretty small, so the Cadpage user base is going to be small, which means everyone has to pay more to cover the same expenses.


Free Cadpage

There is now a "Free" version of Cadpage distributed as a separate app.  This version will never bug anyone for money, and it will be a fully functional version of the "Pro" Cadpage product, with the following exceptions.

  1. It will be unsupported.  All of the options that result in a request for help from the Cadpage developers will be disabled.
  2. It will be updated periodically, but updates will lag the ones published in the "Pro" version by some fixed about of time, probably 3 months.
  3. It will not support the direct messaging feature that allows selected messaging services to send pages to Cadpage without incurring SMS messaging costs.
There is no particular reason why I would recommend using the Free version, when you could just as easily ask for a free subscription to the  Pro version.  But for users who are absolutely adamant that they should not have to pay anything we can use this version.

So that's the plan. Feedback and suggestions are most welcome and can be posted here, emailed to support@cadpage.org, or posted on our Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/CADPage.

Thanks for your support,

-Ken Corbin