Hi Kevin,

Perhaps a brief explanation is required here. The first target we met, was $750 a month, this was to cover our operational costs. Effectively the campaign was to allow us to continue to have an online presence and pay the bills for our hosting, admin and other costs outside of development.

When that goal was met we moved to the next target, which is currently still in progress. The current goal is to get sufficient funding to afford one part time dev. This will allow us to confidently maintain the current addon.

After that goal is met we plan to continue fund raising so we can put resources towards new software.

Apologies if things have been unclear and slow. We had hoped when the fund started to grow end of 2019 that we'd already have in place by now enough resources to have both maintained the current system until its replaced, and build the replacement. But then 2020 ummmm happened? Don't know if thats a good term for it or not, but funding growth slowed down quite a bit in mid 2020.

To give you an idea, the current amount of funding available for development is about USD 250 - 300 a month, which is not huge. So mostly we've been maintaining the current addon and fixing issues with it. Blender has gone through a lot of changes internally and so we've been handling the impacts from that, as well as listening and making improvements where we can.

The new software is being built though, however, its not a visible process yet. Mostly we're rebuilding the internals (as it is a complete rebuild), which will allow all the 'goodies' we're talking about on our website. There's really not much to show right now as we're deep in the weeds of making the invisible part work really well, which takes time. Time we're all putting in out of hours as the team works day jobs. We do this cause we believe in what we're doing and we can see the community does too.

Once the internals are done (code named CRESS by the way, you might have seen that term in blog posts or other replies on the forum), then we can start the process of building the open source addon, which will be visible, cause we're hosting it on GitHub. We started the transition to GitHub this year with zocker1600 moving his free and open source docker containers to our Crowdrender GitHub account. This is where the new stuff will appear.

Another consequence of the slowing in dev fund growth is that we're currently experimenting with diversification, we're looking at doing contract development to integrate our software into studios, and we're also recording content for youtube aimed at helping people chose hardware for their render farms, its all related stuff, but somewhat adjacent to the main software development project. In our opinion its worth doing because having diverse sources of income protects against shocks, like the one we're going through now with the pandemic, which we've been impacted by like a lot of others.

So in short, we're definitely working on these things, but again I concede the visibility hasn't been there. Perhaps we can find a way to rectify that.

Wishing you all the best, hope this helps :)

James