It's a bit difficult to me to understand the points you mentioned ;)
Are you suggesting to funds steempeak doing frequent posts and getting upvotes? So using the reward pool that should be available for content creators instead of using the proposal pool that has been created exactly for the purpose of funding apps and projects? This make no sense to me and most app that work this way are 'forced' to do this to survive. I think we should do the opposite, use the proposal pool and leave the reward pool available for the real users.
Peakmonsters is a side business we created (and for which we are not submitting proposals) that help Steempeak paying for monthly bills. So basically we are using part of the revenue we generate with another business to provide Steempeak for free to everyone.
Currently we are asking 25% of the SPS funds, but in some months (or a year) it will be much less. Probably under 10%.
If you consider the overall amount, $250 as daily pay for a project with 4 people is really a bargain in my opinion. In US or Europe a software developer can easily get the same for 2-4 hours of work (depend on the specific country). So asking the same amount for the whole team is really really fair in my opinion.
As I already said I totally understand different point of views, and everyone is free to evaluate each proposal and decide how to vote. In the end this is one of the awesome thing about a decentralized system :D
You are doing a great job; maybe one of the most important here, as a good front end is what attracts users. I hope you don't let yourselves be bothered by the usual jealous sulkers!
Are you implying I'm jealous of a private entity campaigning for public subsidies? You're reading me wrong, I simply disagree with the funding a few for-profit individuals amongst 1000s with 1/4th of the current SPS pool.
If you make posts that frequently update users on your progress, or for tutorials and community building users have the option of upvoting them or not. What part of this makes no sense? It is how Steem operates. POB rewards aren't just for creativity, people have the choice to upvote a post or not, it's liberal economics.
I get that developers are paid a decent wage, as are many people in US, Europe, and other countries. That being said you are running a business, business owners don't get paid, they either profit or they don't off of their investment of time and money. If you are working for us, you should get paid, but you are working for yourselves investing your own time and money into your own business.
I see what this is about you are asking us to provide you with a subsidy to limit your risk of earning a future profit. If you need money, sell equity-like everyone else, create a token that represents future earning from your endeavors. I'd buy some.
Lot of projects on the platform are business (esteem, busy, ...) have been funded for years thanks to an huge delegation by steemit that they use to get curation rewards. Also some of them have a witness that is still 'funded' by the Steem community.
But now that we have the SPS probably we should switch to the new pool instead of relying on the old method.
And of course if we have a successful proposal we'll probably start 'burning' or declining most of the rewards we get on our posts as that will not be needed anymore.
And it's true, we are a 'for profit company' (not much profit after almost 2 years of work by the way) but what we've done and most of what we'll do in the future will be available to every user free of charge. Most of our profits will come from 'premium' features, but we still work on a tons of things that will benefit Steem as a whole and not just our own business.
I've already said that I understand your doubts and concerns regarding this proposal, we'll just have to see what the community thinks about it.
I thought you guys had a witness, if not who have I been voting for all this time?
If you do get the proposal accepted any chance of making some of the more visually attractive parts of your front end open-sourced? Many other tribes and front ends could use a boost appearance-wise and your collage of posts is particularly appealing.
A witness outside of the top 20 is barely enough to pay for the server bills :D
We have plans to release parts of the mentioned points as open source so others can use the same material. Not sure about parts of the main website itself, but honestly I don't think there are specific place on steempeak so awesome to be useful to other frontends.
But if there are parts someone is interested in I can probably share a few snippets. I've already done this in the past with other developers who asked for specific fragments of code ;)
Fine you have me convinced, I'll vote for your proposal and tell some others to do the same :D
Great, feel free to DM me on discord if you want to talk about steempeak or if you have some feedback/suggestions ;)