As a regular reader of this forum and user of Meteor for two years, I’ve noticed an increasing amount of paranoia/gloom-and-doom regarding Meteor over the past year. From my perspective, I think the move from free hosting to Galaxy, combined with the shift in emphasis from Blaze to React and the emergence of Apollo as a development priority have left community members wondering about the future of Meteor.
It occurs to me that if you care about the future of Meteor, there is a simple way to show your support, give your opinions more meaning, and collectively improve Meteor’s long-term prospects: spend just a little money for Galaxy hosting as your way of providing financial support to Meteor.
Meteor has 36K stars on GitHub. Let’s say a 1,000 of us sign up for Galaxy and spend, say, $10/month starting in 2017 (make it a test deployment service or something, monitor your usage, and cap your spending at $120/year). View it as your personal investment in the future of Meteor with the side-effect of actually providing you with some development benefits. That’s a bump of $120K in income for MDG right there. Not enough, but a start.
Let’s call these folks “Meteoristas”: they recognize the reality that MDG needs income to develop Meteor, and that the developer base is big enough that, working together, we can each contribute a relatively small amount but the impact in aggregate can be significant. Maybe there’s only 1,000 of us next year, but if there are 10,000 of us in three years, it’s real money.
Looking at my records, I’ve only spent about $20 on Galaxy hosting in 2016. That’s pathetic. I am hereby making a public commitment to spend $120 on Galaxy hosting in 2017 (I give that much to my local public radio station, and Meteor is similarly important to me).
If you want to join me in the initial cohort of Meteoristas, just ‘like’ this posting (and silently promise to spend an average of $10/month on Galaxy next year.)
Philip
p.s. I have no affiliation with MDG and they did not put me up to this.