Prototype Fund and three years of pretix

Today marks three years since the first commit to pretix' codebase. On September 8th, 2014, Raphael started writing the first lines of code for pretix, which was code-named "tixl" at the time.

Three years later, pretix' codebase has had contributions from no less than 50 individuals from all over the world. Since its first production usage in June 2015, pretix has successfully handled tens of thousands of ticket sales for a great variety of events of every size. Since February, we have been able to release new versions with exciting new features every month.

We want to thank AV-Room, Adam, Adrian, Ahrdie, Alexander, Alexey, Ben, Bolufite, Brandon, Christian, Christopher, Claudio, Clint, Cpt. Foo, daniel, Enrique, Flavia, Heok, Ian, Jahongir, Jakob, Jan, Jason, Joe, Johan, Jonas, Knuth, Laura, Leah, Lukas, Marc-Pascal, Martin, Marvin, Matthew, Michele, Nicole, Oliver, Sanket, Tobias, Tobias, Tydon, Vishal, and everyone else who contributed to the pretix project with code, feedback, bug reports, suggestions or otherwise.

After testing with some beta customers, the commercial hosting service on pretix.eu has started in February 2017 together with the release of pretix 1.0. Our goal is to make this service fund the further development of pretix as a sustainable open source project. We are thankful for the customers trusting in our service right from the beginning.

Speaking of funding of our development, we are very excited to announce that starting this September, pretix receives funding from the Prototype Fund:

pretix and the Prototype Fund

The Prototype Fund is an initiative of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, funded by the Federal Ministry for Research and Education in Germany. It is aimed to support open source projects in the areas of civic tech, data literacy, data security, and software infrastructure.

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In multiple rounds of six months each, the Prototype Fund distributes public funding to around 25 different, mostly new open source projects selected by a jury after an application process.

We are proud to announce that pretix has been selected as one of the funded projects in the second round. Over the six months starting with September 2017, the Prototype Fund will pay for around 8 hours a week of the development time we spend to develop the open source edition of pretix. This allows us to specifically allocate time for features inside the open source version.

We intend to use this chance to further enhance check-in methods for pretix events. Our Android app, which just recently received a big update with the release of pretix 1.7, will be extended with even more features and we also plan check-in solutions that run on desktop computers instead of mobile devices. Depending on the time left, we also like to think in the direction of functionality for box office sales.

During the period of this funding, we'll keep you up-to-date with our usual release blog posts that list all new features developed at the beginning of each month.

We are thankful for the support we receive through this initiative and look forward to the features it allows us to build!