Substance is a zero-funded project. The initial version was contributed by Michael Aufreiter in a six month coding rally. He got precious help in visual regards from Samo Korosec, a Vienna-based UI-Designer. We want you to take this initial work as a gift. :)

However, at this point we want to bring it to the next level. To do this, we really need your help! We had a long debate about possible business models. But we've come to the conclusion that classical business models do not fit in our case. Substance can only work the way it should if it's free all the way down.

Again, with Substance we want to address users first. We see Substance as an organization, whose aim is not to generate value for the organization itself. Instead our goal is to generate value for the parties (a.k.a people) involved. 

Those are:

• The Users (who can use a free service)
• The Developers (those who are doing the hard job of putting the system together)

No managers. No investors in a conventional sense. Just people. The quality of Substance should be determined by the users as a collective. The community as a whole contributes to the progression of the system. Contributors do not invest into a company. They do invest into individuals, the developers that get the job done. In return users get an improved system they can use. Development takes place in the open so there's full transparency about what's going on.

There's just one important rule, though: Users invest into the improvement of the system and get back a better service. But importantly they do not claim to use the improvements exclusively. There's no downside for any party if others can benefit too. That being said, we strongly believe, that the desire to exclusively own some piece of software leads to the production of ever more proprietary software, thus duplicating the efforts to solve problems that already have been solved multiple times.

Until we have our feature-based donation software in place you can use the Contribute Button at the Startpage. It will send you to Paypal where you can enter the amount you want to contribute. In the initial phase this are considered general purpose donations. We'll use the money to add new features such as Realtime Collaboration, User Comments and PDF Export.

It's $ 442.00 in total - thanks for supporting us!

• $ 50.00 by Max De Marzi
• $ 20.00 by Charles Earl
• $ 20.00 by Andreas Ofner
• $ 5.00 by Vilan Natanzon
• $ 100.00 by Casey Stark
• $ 5.00 by Aaron Müller
• $ 20.00 by Mr. M. Kempe
• $ 20.00 by David Ascher
• $ 7.00 by Hugo Artur Schmitt
• $ 10.00 by Thomas Taschauer
• $ 100.00 by Austin Bales
• $ 25.00 by Garen Torikian
• $ 50.00 by Ahmad Khayyat
• $ 10.00 by Joris Morger