Why there won't be a Butik version 4
This decision was really hard to make and took a lot of time as I hate not finishing things and knowing that others are waiting for version 4. So yes, I feel sorry about not finishing version 4.
Let me be completely honest:
I never built butik for the sake of money. You still might look at it and think that it's pretty expensive.
But at the end of the day it's my spare time, and it’s always been far from compensating for the time and effort I did invest building it. I did only charge for it hoping that it would allow for more development time to improve butik and maybe even pay some bills.
Big chunks of the refactoring for version 4 are already done, but the road to the finished version is very long. I am really happy with the progress of version 4 though. The codebase has been cleaned up drastically and it would have been really easy hooking into most parts as they could have been replaced like lego bricks.
Besides a flexible shipping system, version 4 would have contained multi taxes, products would have felt like a Statamic collection to give you the flexibility that you are used to from collections. As well as a totally different checkout, which would have allowed for even more payment providers.
This just shows how complex and difficult e-commerce is. It's not too difficult to build a shop for a single client however building something flexible that covers every possible scenario and ship it as a package is and will always be rather difficult.
Originally, I have been afraid to be where I am right at this moment. When I started with Butik, it did not support multi taxes or variants and only supported a simple shipping calculation. A neat little shop add-on for non complex settings. That seemed to be a good scope at that time and it was!
Then there came corona and people did ask for more functions over time, which I started to implement and everything did grow and became more complex over time.
Besides my full-time job, it was eating up all my spare time and I still couldn't ship as fast as I wanted to. The current situation is simply not healthy for myself and my family.
Making this decision and writing this text is a tough choice to make. In case some people out there are mad, I do get it. Totally. Even if you are, I hope that you can nonetheless understand that I needed to choose my own family and health over an add-on, which does not pay enough to make it a full-time job.
I am really thankful for the opportunity to build Buik and appreciate the support you have given me. I learned so much along the way. It made me a much better developer and helped me grow a lot.
If there is anything on your mind, please reach out to me!
Thank you, Jonas
