Hi @Noc2,

Thank you for your response. I do understand your concerns about not awarding grants for projects that have been the subject of a successful token sale, however we are still a very early stage project and have not completed a token sale round.

We believe that the Subscription Pricing Pallet that we want to build with this grant would benefit the entire Substrate/Polkadot ecosystem, as we would be building something that has not really been done before in web3. By building this SaaS pricing pallet, we believe that we would be able to show the true capabilities of Substrate and be the web3 industry leaders with this pricing framework.

From an alternative funding standpoint, as we all know this bear market has made the funding landscape very scarce. We are members of the Substrate Builders Program but have been unable to get funding through that vertical. VC funding is also at its lowest in almost five years and is very difficult right now for new projects just starting out. We do greatly appreciate the other two grants that have been awarded to us and hope that we have proven our capabilities to now be asking for a larger level 3 grant. If the W3F team does award us with this additional grant, it will be our last one and we will pursue other funding options from here out.

As I stated earlier, we do believe that this pallet would benefit the ecosystem and we would love the opportunity to be able to build it. This pallet is the key to see if the products that we envision building with Substrate are possible. However, we understand your concerns and ultimately respect the decision of you and your team if this is the right thing to fund.

Thanks, Graeme

Hi @semuelle, no problem at all.

Yes, I can elaborate on why I chose this topic for our next grant.

For the product that we are building - a governance scaling solution, we really see it as a productivity based solution that will benefit from SaaS pricing. Our solution is not a transactional based system like DeFi products that are now basically commodities - the best product being determined based on liquidity and transactional price. As well, Polkadot will benefit from a SaaS based pricing system in the following three ways:

• First, it has been well documented that when DAO/community members have to pay any amount in gas fees to vote or create governance proposals they are much less likely to do so. Thus, by eliminating the gas fees for DAO members we expect it to greatly increase governance participation rates.

• Second, our platform will be a governance scaling solution for the Polkadot ecosystem and other ecosystems such as Ethereum. To get a DAO member to purchase the token for the DAO and then also purchase the token of the chain they need to pay gas fees for, creates a massive barrier for the DAO to use on-chain products.

  • Example: We have two Ethereum design partners that we would like to onboard to our application. These are projects with 6,000 & 21,000 token holders. For these communities to get all of their members to purchase an additional token for gas to start using our application will be a major hurdle for its adoption. However, if the community itself just needs to purchase a gas fee token, now only one entity needs to do this vs the 6,000 or 21,000 token holders.

• Third, we plan to use our application for new communities entering web3. It will be much easier to onboard new members to web3 if the community / DAO is the only one paying the fees and the members just have to set up a wallet to use the application, where the community token can be airdropped. This way the members do not need to go through an onramp or centralized exchange to purchase a token to pay for gas fees as well.

  • Example: We are trying to partner with a music festival that would like to have more community involvement from their attendees. Each attendee would be given an NFT for their entrance. This NFT can then be used to create and vote on proposals for the music festival. However, we cannot expect the 300k attendees that may have never used web3 before to purchase a token to pay for gas fees to participate. This is why the subscription pricing, where the music festival is paying for the transactions of their community will greatly help onboard users into the Polkadot ecosystem.

I hope that these use cases show the benefits of a SaaS based payment structure for an application like ours and what it can do for the Polkadot ecosystem. We specifically chose Substrate as the SDK for our chain, as we knew that we would be able to build this style of product with it.

As for the grant being more expensive than the other two is for a few reasons. First, we are delivering more milestones than the other two grants (we are delivering three milestones vs two milestones in each of the other grants). Second, we are building something that alters the fee structure of the chain, so we believe that there will be a lot more testing required than the other grants. We want to make sure that the pallet works as intended and do not want any chain that is using it be subject to DDos attacks. Third, we are charging our engineers closer to market rate for this grant. In the other grants, we charged our engineers below market rate to make sure that it fit within the Level Two pricing constraints. However, if price is an issue for this grant I am open to lowering it.

Finally, I am more than happy to jump on a call to discuss any of your concerns. Thanks.

cc: @Noc2 and @keeganquigley

Hi @Noc2, that is great to hear. I understand where you are coming from and have lowered the price of the grant to 50k USD. Does this new price work with you?

Hey @takahser,

Thanks for your questions! Here are my responses.

1. It seems to me as you're increasing the rate with each grant. Could you elaborate on the reasons?
   Here's a comparison between the previous and current rates:
   • Societal: 30k for 12 FTE months => 2.5k/FTE month
   • Societal 2: 30k for 6 FTE months => 5k/FTE month
   • current grant proposal: 50k for 8 FTE months => 6.25k/FTE month

The first grant should of had 2 FTEs listed and not 3. This was an error on my end, I apologize for this. This would bring the total 30k grant to 8 FTE months => 3.75k / FTE month. We had this listed out at six months as were were only beginning our substrate development journey and did not know how long it would take. We estimated how long it would take us to complete the grant, including time for us to learn Substrate development. However, we did not charge that learning time back to the W3F and only wanted to charge for core development hours.

As for the increase in the subsequent grants. As we progressed in our understanding of substrate development, we have been better able to determine the time of development and our costs associated with it. Thus, we are getting closer to our actual development rate with each grant, while staying within the level constraints. Also, I outlined some points for this in the in my response to @semuelle above.

As for the grant being more expensive than the other two is for a few reasons. First, we are delivering more milestones than the other two grants (we are delivering three milestones vs two milestones in each of the other grants). Second, we are building something that alters the fee structure of the chain, so we believe that there will be a lot more testing required than the other grants. We want to make sure that the pallet works as intended and do not want any chain that is using it be subject to DDos attacks. Third, we are charging our engineers closer to market rate for this grant. In the other grants, we charged our engineers below market rate to make sure that it fit within the Level Two pricing constraints. However, if price is an issue for this grant I am open to lowering it.

Finally, this grant is only an estimate on the amount of time that it will take. We could run into challenges that would make the grant take longer, without the befit of additional compensation.

2. I watched your prototype demo and at 3:30 you introduce the subscription feature which sounds very similar to this application. Can you elaborate on what you'll implement in addition to what it's shown in the prototype?

The prototype in this demo is a figma mock up, so we will be building the backend to actually support what we have envisioned in the prototype. This will include a DAO being able to pay a monthly fee, which will unlock certain functions for the DAO members, that they can interact with and not pay a gas fee. The developer setting up the pallet will be able to select what functions go into each subscriptions and set a maximum number of times they can be called. Finally, there will be an automatic monthly recurring payment set up for the DAO, directly from its treasury.

3. Regarding the gasless payments, I like the idea. I was wondering how you are going to implement this? Will the DAO-owner have to prepay the fees? Or will the necessary functions be gassless themselves, i.e. transactions that result in calling them will not be charged with gas fees?

The monthly fee will come from the DAOs treasury and not the DAO-owner per say. Maybe in the initial months of the DAO, the owner(s) will have to fund the treasury to pay the monthly subscription, but this will ultimately be on a case by case basis. As for the functions, yes they will be gasless for the DAO members if there is a active paid plan by the DAO. No fees will be collected from the user or the DAO at the time of function execution. We do still plan to do proper benchmarking and weights of each function, to know how much they would cost in a dollar value. This would then allow us to set up a maximum amount of functions that each DAO is able to transact on a monthly basis.

I hope this answers your questions. Please let me know if you have any more. Thanks!

Hey @takahser,

I wanted to follow up here to see if I answered all of your questions? As it would be great to know a decision on this grant, to know how to allocate resources.

Thanks!

Hi @takahser, thanks for your response. I really do not think that I would be able to complete the outlined work for the price of a level 2 grant.

Would a price of 40k work for the existing scope? Alternatively, I can remove milestone 3 from the grant and move it to a level 2 grant.

Please let me know what would be best.

@gfox1 Thank you for considering a price reduction for the grant. After further evaluation I'm willing to support it at $40k although I still think it's rather pricy.

Hi @Noc2 and @takahser, thank you for your quick response on this.

Based on @takahser's comment, I have updated the grant to $40k with the same scope of work.

Thank you for approving this grant. We are really looking forward to working on it! Let me know if the team needs anything else.

cc: @semuelle

Thanks @gfox1 for answering all the questions. A couple of additional ones:

• Gas fees help to prevent against spam transactions. Will there be any mechanisms in place to help prevent it?
• MetaMask isn't compatible with SS58 substrate accounts as far as I'm aware. Would it just be for custom DAO tokens?

Hey @keeganquigley, here are the answers to your questions:

• Gas fees help to prevent against spam transactions. Will there be any mechanisms in place to help prevent it?

Yes, there will be mechanisms in place to help prevent it. Each subscriptions tier will have a maximum number of function calls that the organization can transact. If they go over this amount, then they will have to pay more. Second, each function will also have a the ability to set a maximum amount of times it can be called during a subscription period. Finally, we will also set it up so each wallet can only make a specific number of transactions per subscription period. These mechanisms will help prevent spam on the network.

• MetaMask isn't compatible with SS58 substrate accounts as far as I'm aware. Would it just be for custom DAO tokens?

The first implementation will be with Substrate Accounts and Substrate based tokens. However, in the future we will also make the functionality work with MetaMask wallets, as we see this being a key factor to bring DAOs from ETH to Polkadot.

Hope this answered your questions.

@gfox1 thanks for answering the questions and lowering the price. I'm happy to go ahead with it as well.

Hey @semuelle, who else do we need to get to approve this grant?

Hey @semuelle, who else do we need to get to approve this grant?

none :)

Congratulations and welcome to the Web3 Foundation Grants Program! Please refer to our Milestone Delivery repository for instructions on how to submit milestones and invoices, our FAQ for frequently asked questions and the support section of our README for more ways to find answers to your questions.

Before you start, take a moment to read through our announcement guidelines for all communications related to the grant or make them known to the right person in your organisation. In particular, please don't announce the grant publicly before at least the first milestone of your project has been approved. At that point or shortly before, you can get in touch with us at grantsPR@web3.foundation and we'll be happy to collaborate on an announcement about the work you’re doing.

Lastly, please remember to let us know in case you run into any delays or deviate from the deliverables in your application. You can either leave a comment here or directly request to amend your application via PR. We wish you luck with your project! 🚀

Hey @semuelle, who else do we need to get to approve this grant?

none :)

Perfect!

Thanks everyone for approving this grant! Really looking forward to delivering the milestones 🙂