First of all, congratulations on reaching your funding goal!
I’ve been following the campaign for the Librem 5 phone since I completed the survey some months ago. I am very interested in purchasing both the dev kit and phone however I am somewhat reluctant to pay the full amount for two products that don’t yet exist. I apologise for my scepticism but I’ve seen people get burnt plenty of times from backing failed crowd funding campaigns.
My personal interest is that I am currently developing a Linux distribution for mobile devices and the Librem 5 would be an primary device target due to its mainline Linux support.
My questions are as follows:
Will the dev kit and phone go on general sale at the same time that they are shipped to campaign backers?
If I wait until both the dev kit and phone go on general sale, am I likely to be able to purchase them or would you expect to have issues with availability?
Will the general sale prices of the dev kit and phone remain the same as what is currently listed in the crowd funding campaign?
Have you considered offering a perk/reward which would allow us to place a deposit of say 10% or 20% of the product value and then pay the rest at the time of release? In my opinion, this would enable more people to support you and would also help you to estimate the number of units you will need to produce. I very much want to support your campaign but I’m not a gambler and I’m afraid that to pay the full amount now would be too much of a risk for me. I think there may be plenty more potential customers who feel the same as me.
I am too interested in dev kit, but my current budget allowed me to only back phone and nothing else. Would be great if I could pay for dev kit in January and still be able to receive it about half a year before the finished product ships.
It’s a shame that I haven’t had any response from Purism. I’m going to have to give it a miss for now. I wish Purism success and I hope there will be an opportunity to purchase the device on release.
From what I understood you will be able to purchase anything in the librem5 range as preorders, when the campaign ends. Hard to find an official statement on the site though, but I heard some backers received a mail…
Just posted this in another thread, but it seems to be coming up across multiple threads. The post I’m linking quotes an email response from the Purism team indicating that you can continue to buy the phone after the crowdfunding stage, but the actual price at release may be different from the crowdfunding price.