Dear Community,
My name is Christian Bennefeld, co-founder of eBlocker. Today I would like to inform you about important news for all eBlocker users from my personal perspective.
When we lost our startup eBlocker GmbH in 2019 due to investor withdrawal after five successful years, a world collapsed for us. A world we rebuilt together thanks to your help, valued community.
For us, the relaunch was primarily about preserving the technology and continuing our vision of regaining the lost Internet privacy for everyone. Therefore, we had set clear principles for the relaunch:
- Independence from investors and no profit orientation
- Funding through donations and free protection for everyone
- Cost efficiency without permanent employees, offices and hardware production
- Openness through Open Source and co-development with volunteers
At the same time, we aimed to provide the same level of protection with daily update service as in commercial times.
Today, 20 months later, I regret to say that this model is unfortunately no longer working. The willingness to donate is decreasing despite continued user growth and we can no longer cover the operating costs.
Therefore with the current update to eBlockerOS 2.7 we change something important:
We now limit the automatic update service with daily updates, curated and licensed filters as well as software updates to project supporters only. Everyone who supports the project in our team or with at least 5 € per month will receive a thank you.
The thank you is a license key which enables the switch “automatic updates” in the eBlocker settings again. This switch got deactivated for all users in eBlockerOS 2.7. So the community had decided in the poll for further funding recently.
In this way, we see good chances for covering the operating costs of our altruistic project again and thus sustaining it in the long term.
Speaking of which, today we have very low costs of around 5,000 € per month. In comparison, in GmbH times we had costs of more than 100,000 € per month – without the hardware production costs. Currently, about 3,000 requests reach our update servers every day. The rest can be calculated by everyone… 😉
The good news at the end:
eBlockerOS remains open source, is free of charge and manual updates are possible without change. If you update manually every day, you are protected just like before.
We also stick to our principles and our vision to free the internet from data collectors on all devices. Of course, we are still grateful for donations, sponsors and supporters, such as DEVK insurance, who are essential for new features such as the personal device firewall.
Even though I personally would have preferred to continue with the previous model, I believe that this approach is good and a fair compromise for everyone. Let’s continue to tackle it together and stand up to the data giants!
Thank you so much for your support!
Best regards
Christian (aka Benne)
PS: Learn more about the new features in eBlockerOS 2.7 here.