Introducing BookStack Support Services

Dan Brown posted on the 21st of March 2022

Today I’m happy to announce availability of official BookStack support services! These services are broken down into a couple of different plans, the detail of which can be found on our new support page.

Purpose & Inception of These Services

These services are primarily intended to service business BookStack users that need some level of guaranteed, and/or official, support offering to make BookStack viable in their environment. Our plans offer an outlet for the IT team of a company to contact directly with an assurance of official support.

Over the last couple of years I have heard multiple accounts of management discounting BookStack due to its lack of obvious income routes, skeptical the project may disappear at any moment. Upon that I have received an increasing amount of enquiries regarding provision of support, in addition to requests for deeper hands-on-help via video calls. Additionally, when using an open source project within a business it can be difficult to approve funding for a recurring donation whereas paying for a clearly described support service can slip through accounting with relative ease. It’s due to these reasons I saw a demand for such support services.

Thanks to my wonderful sponsors, and to my supportive family, I found myself in a unique position where I can provide and grow these service offerings as a means to eventually cover my own costs to keep working on the project full time.

Existing Community Support

The introduction of these services does not mean I’ll stop providing/offering community support via our existing channels (GitHub, Discord, Reddit); In fact it should mean I can offer more support there. By offering these services I intend to cover my costs to keep working on the project as my primary career and therefore have more time to dedicate to those community channels.

Funding Long Term Sustainable Open Source Development

With BookStack in its current state the amount of work required to keep the project maintained, with active community management (Discord/GitHub issues/Pull-request handling etc…), is fairly significant. Each feature addition or option supported adds to the weight, and I’m increasingly having to discount features due to their potential maintenance affect to keep the project sustainable. It’s at a point where it’s a challenge to work on much more than ongoing maintenance while being a side-project.

While taking a career break since October last year I’ve enjoyed being able to spend more time on the project, with feature releases almost monthly, which has opened my eyes to envision this healthier rate of development longer term. These new support services are the next step for walking along that longer term sustainable journey.

Header Image Credits:  Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash