Chocolatey Kickstarter

In October 2014, we ran a highly successful Kickstarter campaign to put the things in place for a viable future for Chocolatey for the next 20+ years!

• At the time the community repository had just over 5 million downloads of software/packages and 2,000+ unique packages. Compare that to just two years later at 60+ million downloads and over 4,000 unique packages!
• The team was attempting to raise at least $40,000.
• The Kickstarter campaign ran for 32 days.
• The campaign funded successfully with 3 days left in the campaign.
• We received backing from 1,044 folks and organizations totalling $51,071 (127% of goal)!
• This makes Chocolatey one of the first and few successful Kickstarters in the Microsoft .NET ecosystem.

As a community, you told us you wanted Chocolatey to stick around for the foreseeable future as much as we did and were willing to step up and make a difference. If you benefit from Chocolatey today, it is due in part to the amazing folks and organizations that stepped up and said "Yes!" Be sure to thank a backer if you happen to meet them!

Why did we do a Kickstarter?

The following were the original stated goals of the Kickstarter:

• To invest in non-free features we believe bring more stability, safety, and security to Chocolatey.
• To support improvements to the infrastructure. We currently spend under $1K/month (this was in 2014, it has more than doubled as of 2016) and see a need to more than double that to support a staging environment, a build/test infrastructure, and load balancing needs as Chocolatey continues to increase steadily in popularity. At the time, the costs were paid by Rob's company (RealDimensions Software, LLC) and the tremendous generosity of others, including AppHarbor. We believe there is a crucial need for Chocolatey to become self-sustaining to reduce unforeseen risks.
• To give the Chocolatey team more freedom to concentrate on Chocolatey so we can get these features to you faster.

Rob Reynolds

CEO and Founder of Chocolatey

If you were a backer at any level, thank you! Without your support, Chocolatey would have struggled to achieve what we've achieved together. Where we are today is a reflection of decisions we made yesterday. What you've enabled us to do has been awesome!