Access Hobu

Access Hobu is a month-to-month subscription for developer support from the award winning Hobu, Inc team. Its features include:

Your development questions answered in real-time by world experts in open source geospatial tools over Slack or Teams or equivalent "single user" or "guest" channel
"Business hours" communication responsiveness
Severable by either party for any reason by notification by 1st of the month
Monthly invoice $2,000

Knowing what is possible with open source software and then knowing the pathway to achieve success requires significant investment and experience. Access Hobu gives your team the option to boost your investment in technologies that Hobu has developed and managed over two decades in the open source geospatial industry.

Benefits

Direct support of the following open source software:

PDAL
Entwine
Untwine
GDAL
PROJ
COPC
Many others such as laspy, libspatialindex, Rtree, GEOS, and CODEM

Open source support activities:

Bug fixing
Construction of demonstration software
Documentation
Open source debugging
Open source packaging support (conda, etc)
Open source roadmap

Consulting and advice on point cloud challenges:

Data organization and formatting for national-scale data
Visualization options
Cloud computing engineering support
Computing efficiency

FAQ

Why should we pay for support for software that costs us nothing?

Efficiency. A few questions to our team could eliminate a two week investigation about capabilities or feasibility of an approach. The time and resource cost of that is not worth the investment, especially in the exploratory phase of development.
Reach. The Hobu team's experience in the open source geospatial industry means it can give you leads, answers to difficult questions, or put you in contact with the exact specialized expertise you might need. Your team doesn't have the time to build that reputation.
Influence. Open source software lives and dies by attention, and you are buying attention to your problems with your subscription.
Risk. Unless your team is directly investing its time in the software itself, it doesn't know the development roadmap, which features are not well attended to, or what future development priorities might impact your operating applications. If your systems only depend upon the software at a single point in time, support is not needed, but if you hope to benefit from the continued evolution of the tools you chose to build upon, knowing (or shaping) the future is valuable risk mitigation.

Can't we just hire you hourly?

Our minimum engagement for hourly-based development activity is $20,000 USD.

We can quit any time we want?

Yep, but so can we. Think of it as a low risk engagement for both sides. If your team isn't getting the value out of it you need, simply notify us you plan to discontinue.

Only Teams or Slack?

Well, email is fine too, but the best way to support your team is at the moment they are active with the software tools, and this is commonly supported through some kind of chat software.

Can't we just ask our questions on a mailing list?

Of course, but no one owes you an answer. We will respond, and if we don't know the answer, we will reach out to our contacts in the community to try and find one for you.