Earlier this year I ran the 2017 Phinx product survey. The main goal behind this survey was to gauge public interest about a pro version and the features to work on next. I was fortunate enough to collect hundreds of responses. It turns out more than 80% of people use Phinx in the workplace with MySQL being the most popular database of choice. Whilst there was actually a decent amount of interest in a commercial version I've decided this is not the option I'm going to take.

Over the past 12 months Phinx development hasn't been as active as we would of liked. In fact until yesterday we hadn't shipped any new releases for quite a few months. This comes at a time where the project is doing roughly 6,000 downloads a day and is about to break the 3 million mark. Maintaining this project takes a considerable amount of time especially when it comes to understanding the intricacies of different relational database systems (nearly 40 years of history right there).

It's clear that the best way to accelerate the project is to obviously spend more time on it. I've done a lot of research and decided to adopt a Patreon model for development. This seems to be working reasonably well for other open source projects including those wildly popular JavaScript ones. You can find the Phinx Patreon page here with various incentives for making a pledge. We also have spots for bigger corporates including a sponsorship level that will feature your logo on Phinx.org. The website does about 5k views/month. I'd encourage you to take a look and see what my plans are.

Phinx has been always free since I first open-sourced it early in 2012. To cover some of the costs I sell a screencast and accept PayPal donations from the website so this is an experiment for me. If it works out then great!