Information The future of TeaSpeak

[WolverinDEV]

EDIT:
Update available:

Information - The future of TeaSpeak

O que é isso?

forum.teaspeak.de

Hey folks,
this important announcement will be about the future of TeaSpeak.

But first of all, let me thank each and every one of you for your great support and feedback throughout the project so far.
Over the past years, we have built a pleasant, helpful and continuously growing community of amazing people.
You stand out for your encouragement, and constructive feedback as well as your extraordinary support for all members of the community.
With your support, I have been able to successfully build, maintain and evolve the TeaSpeak - Server, Client and WebClient applications!
As of now, more than 1500 individual server instances are up and running, serving over 70.000 - 100.000 concurrent connected users worldwide daily!

When I started TeaSpeak back in 2017,
I was in Highschool, I saw a need, had a vision, some time to spare and was drinking lots of tea while programming the first server version.
Since then I have put in a lot of my personal spare time and effort into it, maintaining as well as developing new features or implementing your suggested ideas. We have successfully created a web client, integrated a music bot system and processed over a thousand issues on GitHub, not to
mention all the work done within the forum by you and the TeaSpeak team.

This close Interaction with you makes TeaSpeak unique as a software compared to any other known VoIP communication software.

But times are changing!
I graduated from Highschool, enrolled in a University and moved out into my first own home.
Growing up does not only mean independence, it also comes with more responsibilities, furthermost financially maintaining oneself.
As I am not on a grant and do get little monetary support I depend on a paid job to be able to pay my bills.

I very much love to work on the TeaSpeak project and hate not to have enough time to push things forward as I used to do.

You may have probably noticed this as you see me less active in our forum.
I am trying my best to frequently allocate any time I can spare for support and development.
But sometimes I only have enough free time twice or three times a week.
This is clearly not sufficient to keep the project running on the long term and
would eventually lead TeaSpeak to fall apart due to such a stupid reason.
A thing I would absolutely hate to see happening.

To avoid such a future, some things must be changed.
I am currently waging some thoughts and developing ideas.
Since the active community is a key element in TeaSpeak project, I want to share these thoughts with you at this very early stage.
You are very much invited to comment and voice your opinions.
Maybe you have even some other ideas. Please let me know!

Please keep in mind, that the following Ideas are just early thoughts and it is not about a decision,
which has been made or needs to be made soon.
Right now, these 3 broad future options have sprung up in my thinking:

1. Commercialise TeaSpeak
   Since the beginning, TeaSpeak is a free to use software.
   If you wonder about the premium memberships we offer,
   I can truthfully state that all earnings went back into the project.
   
   Even though this idea seems to be counter-intuitive to the original concept of TeaSpeak,
   this step might be required to keep it rolling. It would allow me to quit my job and
   put this time into TeaSpeak.
   
   Commercialisation might also bring other benefits like being able to hire employees,
   having updates on regular bases and so on.
   
   
2. Finding and entering a development partnership
   The development workload of TeaSpeak is way over available time I have right now.
   Finding a partnership could be effective in two ways:
   ⠀
   1. Reducing the development workload
      If I could find a partner with which I could develop TeaSpeak together it would reduce the workload for me a lot.
      Sadly, I've not yet found anybody, who has some spare time and seems to be capable of maintaining TeaSpeak.
      
      
   2. Helping out financially
      This would be like the thought "Commercialise TeaSpeak", except not commercialising TeaSpeak.
      Even though the commercial aspect isn't a thing,
      I don't think that you can find anybody which supports the project financially without wanting something in return.
      But maybe, somebody could demonstrate the opposite?
      ⠀
4. Make TeaSpeak a FOSS (Free and open-source software)
   As stated, I don't want to see TeaSpeak to fall apart,
   so if I have no time to actively maintain TeaSpeak I want to bring up the opportunity for everybody else.
   Even though this opportunity sounds like a charm in the first place, it has some decent drawbacks.
   I would be depended on voluntary support (especially financially) to keep up
   the services we currently provide (website, forum, file mirrors and so on).
   
   So in conclusion, even thou everybody has the opportunity to contribute and work on the project,
   the project will not be the same as it today....

In conclusion, what does this mean to the feature of TeaSpeak?
First of all: This will not be the end of TeaSpeak. TeaSpeak will not fall apart and constantly be maintained by me in the feature!
Even though some things need to change TeaSpeak will live on!
TeaSpeak has and will have a bright feature as the software it currently is and its upcoming new features.

You are welcome to comment, share your thoughts and introduce new ideas on this topic.

Best regards
WolverinDEV

PS: This post turned out to be much longer that originally expected, but thanks for reading thou it, if you've done so!

 

[lukaprokic125@gm]

maybe will be good idea to start project for teaserver windows?

 

[WolverinDEV]

I guess you've missed the point of this topic....

 

[latters]

WolverinDEV, I have been with you since the beginning.
And you have my full support to keep the teaspeak.

 

[xDyego]

Option 1 is not a bad option, if we want to keep TeaSpeak active, it is not a high value, I think it is a fair value, in fact, everyone could be PREMIUM customers, of course you could launch a free version, but it would be limited , for example, to 2 servers. (even because we need to have test servers)
This is just my opinion.

 

[lukaprokic125@gm]

Option 1 is not a bad option, if we want to keep TeaSpeak active, it is not a high value, I think it is a fair value, in fact, everyone could be PREMIUM customers, of course you could launch a free version, but it would be limited , for example, to 2 servers. (even because we need to have test servers)
This is just my opinion.

this killing tea moto licence fee is not your cup of tea!

---- Automatically Merged Double Post ----

I guess you've missed the point of this topic....

yeah but teaserver for windows is needed.

 

[pichotm]

Something reasonable you should do is requesting the people making money off your own like hosting services to pay you either a license fee or a % of each sale. This would still let TeaSpeak competitive and preserve the 'open-source' and free-for-use values for other people.

 

[eduardoroeder]

Before joining the discussion,

this killing tea moto licence fee is not your cup of tea!

---- Automatically Merged Double Post ----


yeah but teaserver for windows is needed.

Bruh... The whole thread is about @WolverinDEV not having enough time to even MAINTAIN the current development flow and you want him to develop to a completely different architeture? I aggree that more OS would be more options to users chose, but developing costs time, time costs money. If he has no time and the software is not generating enough revenue... How come he implement a game-changing OS support?

@Topic:
Well, I'm both happy and sad about this thread. Happy because of the transparency about the situation, but sad to see that the development time is getting limited (and all the other things that causes this limiting of time, of course).

That said, I've been in your place where I developed a software in my highschool, sold it for couple years and after some time I had no time (and enjoyment) to keep up updating and maintaining it with the same flow I was doing it earlier. I had the same feeling that you are exposing in the thread, but that's kind of inevitable if you don't find a solution. So it's the reason I get happy about, you are exposing the situation and then showing us the (early) options available.

All three options aren't really attractive (but hey, they are options!). In my opinion, the first one is actually the long term solution between those 3. Personally, I don't mind changing concepts, since things and situations change. Also, most users uses the servers to generate revenue. And it's kind of sad that people generate revenue with it and they don't even buy the premium package to stimulate you fix or improve the software they earn money with (???????????????????????? makes no sense to me). I'd suggest you to instead charge per license, charge per slots available, such as up to 128 slots free (higher than the other software) and then from there you put a breakpoint to change the prices (the more slots the user want to offer, the less the price per slot). IDK if this would improve the people adherence ot pay for the software itself, or if would even be able to pay for the infraestructure cost, but that could be a start.

For 2nd, you could try out some other voice server forums to achieve that partnership, but I'm pretty sure you would need to share the code, which might eventually lead to the 3rd point. So you would have to set up a contract with every small detail. But in the end of the day, if you @WolverinDEV doesn''t have enough time, TeaSpeak will suffer the consequences of not being the "main product" of your development schedule.

I don't really know you much, but as I've seen for the last 2 years in this forum you put a lot of effort in this project, and with effor I mean hard work and passion. So I'm pretty sure that you will find eventually a decision that will make the best path in the next couple months.

 

[Saci]

I support the teaspeak since the beginning, I'm a premium user
I wish you to keep compatibility and the initial idea of the project and I will always be a financial backer

keep current billing, so it will be bearable for a greater number of users
high charges by% or number of servers in my opinion would be bad, there would be no difference from ts3

keep protocol 3.1

 

[eduardoroeder]

I support the teaspeak since the beginning, I'm a premium user
I wish you to keep compatibility and the initial idea of the project and I will always be a financial backer

keep current billing, so it will be bearable for a greater number of users
high charges by% or number of servers in my opinion would be bad, there would be no difference from ts3

keep protocol 3.1

I disagree. The issue with the other mentioned company is not the price of the license or the license itself, but how hard it is to get one license to re-sell the voice servers. @WolverinDEV doesn't mind how your site looks, what people uses, how much do you have in balance and other futile data in order to you set up a server with his software. If he charges every reseller, he will get a part of the profit and that could be a potential factor to make the software more attractive to new users (read: more users, more income. More income, more time to develop/more development. More development, more users... More users, more income). The price of course could be signifcantly lower than the forementioned company but still it could be profitable if managed correctly.

 

[Vafin]

As of now, more than 1500 individual server instances are up and running, serving over 70.000 - 100.000 concurrent connected users worldwide daily!

You just need to set the price for 1 slot at $0.01 per month and then your income will be about $1000 per month. I think it's a fair price.

 

[shinzoke]

Talking about what and how much he should be charging people isn’t up to us if you ask me...
Since day one I arrived here I’ve been using TeaSpeak (2servers - Max slots) for my community online and at the current state I haven’t been able to produce or reproduce any errors/bugs yet, so looking at “nice developing” I think wolv... is doing a supreme job...
But like he stated above... it’s hard to maintain a program in spare time...
Anyway...
what I suggest for those who would like to help out...
Make a post (preferably in the right forum section that prolly needs to be added first)
Where you discribe what you are able to in Theems of coding/programming..
What eventually could lead to a good candidate for wolv...

now keeping in mind of what was told in the first post here...
I see people complaining about stuff that isn’t yet possible or ready to use, but they expect everything to be free... (look at it trough a developers view: you’ve spend an enormous amount of spare time into developing something, including personal money) wouldn’t that just be saying fuck you developer I want that sh*t for free?
thatssomething you just don’t do..

anyway..
You got my support and understanding
And you can always PM me concerning what ever...
Ill be glad to help out if I can.

greetz,
Shinzoke


ps: whatever someone says... wolv already did a wonderful job if you look at the current state of TeaSpeak... Keep it up bro

 

[Saci]

be careful with people who give ambitious ideas, this can harm the project
you can keep the charge as it is today and increase the benefit of using the premium version, include protocol 3.1 and other advantages and compatibility, you can start like this!

99% use tea because of protocol 3.1, I suggest you take a vote and you will discover the truth!

in the future you can modify and adapt new things

this is my suggestion to the developer!

 

[Vafin]

be careful with people who give ambitious ideas, this can harm the project
you can keep the charge as it is today and increase the benefit of using the premium version, include protocol 3.1 and other advantages and compatibility, you can start like this!

99% use tea because of protocol 3.1, I suggest you take a vote and you will discover the truth!

in the future you can modify and adapt new things

this is my suggestion to the developer!

TeaSpeak will always depend on another project if it uses Protocol 3.1 in the future.

 

[Saci]

TeaSpeak will always depend on another project if it uses Protocol 3.1 in the future.

I do not agree with you,
I don't answer your post so why don't I agree with you
my opinion and was directed to the developer and not you, who decides he is.
who makes premium license purchases that provide financial support, not opinions.

I suggest you take the vote!

 

[Vafin]

I do not agree with you,
I don't answer your post so why don't I agree with you
my opinion and was directed to the developer and not you, who decides he is.
who makes premium license purchases that provide financial support, not opinions.

I suggest you take the vote!

I just want TeaSpeak to be self-sufficient and independent of the competition. All you need to do is make TeaClient the best app of its kind.

 

[Kjnzx]

Before joining the discussion,

Bruh... The whole thread is about @WolverinDEV not having enough time to even MAINTAIN the current development flow and you want him to develop to a completely different architeture? I aggree that more OS would be more options to users chose, but developing costs time, time costs money. If he has no time and the software is not generating enough revenue... How come he implement a game-changing OS support?

@Topic:
Well, I'm both happy and sad about this thread. Happy because of the transparency about the situation, but sad to see that the development time is getting limited (and all the other things that causes this limiting of time, of course).

That said, I've been in your place where I developed a software in my highschool, sold it for couple years and after some time I had no time (and enjoyment) to keep up updating and maintaining it with the same flow I was doing it earlier. I had the same feeling that you are exposing in the thread, but that's kind of inevitable if you don't find a solution. So it's the reason I get happy about, you are exposing the situation and then showing us the (early) options available.

All three options aren't really attractive (but hey, they are options!). In my opinion, the first one is actually the long term solution between those 3. Personally, I don't mind changing concepts, since things and situations change. Also, most users uses the servers to generate revenue. And it's kind of sad that people generate revenue with it and they don't even buy the premium package to stimulate you fix or improve the software they earn money with (???????????????????????? makes no sense to me). I'd suggest you to instead charge per license, charge per slots available, such as up to 128 slots free (higher than the other software) and then from there you put a breakpoint to change the prices (the more slots the user want to offer, the less the price per slot). IDK if this would improve the people adherence ot pay for the software itself, or if would even be able to pay for the infraestructure cost, but that could be a start.

For 2nd, you could try out some other voice server forums to achieve that partnership, but I'm pretty sure you would need to share the code, which might eventually lead to the 3rd point. So you would have to set up a contract with every small detail. But in the end of the day, if you @WolverinDEV doesn''t have enough time, TeaSpeak will suffer the consequences of not being the "main product" of your development schedule.

I don't really know you much, but as I've seen for the last 2 years in this forum you put a lot of effort in this project, and with effor I mean hard work and passion. So I'm pretty sure that you will find eventually a decision that will make the best path in the next couple months.

I agree with you, Eduardo. He said everything.

 

[WolverinDEV]

Hey,
thanks for all your responses already.
I'll read each and every of them through in this evening when I'm at home

 

[farhadhelix]

just make using teaspeak with a monthly premium so any one who want to use it must have premium license
i know you started it as free version. i was here since your first version of teaspeak( i remember it wont last 1 hours of running )
now its good and stable so it need to be profitable. you giving your time for it so it MUST have profit for you

 

[WolverinDEV]

Something reasonable you should do is requesting the people making money off your own like hosting services to pay you either a license fee or a % of each sale. This would still let TeaSpeak competitive and preserve the 'open-source' and free-for-use values for other people.

The idea is not bad in general, but I would have to compete with other companies since the TeaSpeak server is free to use and currently free to sell as well. If I would make the server not free to use any more, I would not have a need for a hosting company.


@eduardoroeder I'll not quote your long post from above, but imagine you'll find your quote -- here --
I really appreciate your kind words. Especially as a person which already had this kind of dilemma it's quite interesting to read through your statement.

I'm also seeing a point in option one as well, but a big thing I'm concerned about is the market.
TeaSpeak is aimed to provide a secure, high quality voice and decentralised communication infrastructure for the gaming community.
Sadly, at least I, noticed that the youth does not care about security nor being the controller of where your data goes....
Even thou providing a reliably voice communication is still a thing, the focus changed.

Back in "the early days" (2005 - 2015) it was all about speaking, being actively together, having fun and enjoying the time.
Even though this is still a thing today, the active aspect got lost. Today it's more about being passive in a (pseudo) community and especially showing off so. As comparison you could take Discord.

These are just thoughts due to observations about the market situation. Since this whole topic is all about gathering ideas and weighing them I've not yet done a more complex market analysis but I think the reality would be quite similar.

Side note: I've already thought about a decentralised friendship model for TeaSpeak which allows chatting and/or even voice communication without being actively connected to any server, but this is definitively another topic.

As you said, yes especially point 2.1 could be seen as a sub bullet of point three.
But since I've not a specific vision about a partnership I more wanted to point out the opportunity of one

high charges by% or number of servers in my opinion would be bad, there would be no difference from ts3

Yeahr that's also a point which I've in mind and I'm concerned about....

-- Since this answer? gets quite long I'll split it up into two