Hi Bruno,
Thanks for reaching out. I am pleased that you are finding PsychoPy and Pavlovia useful tools in your research.
We do understand your issue and we have always tried very hard to provide resources for people of with a range of resources available to them and in all countries, which is why most of our work is made available freely (PsychoPy, and sharing/sourcing studies on pavlovia).
Sadly, some of the services we provide (such as hosting of experiments and running of workshops) have direct costs to us, especially in the payment of salaries, and those costs come to us in GBP. While we are not trying to make profits, we need to charge a sum for those services that makes them sustainable. Yes, we could charge a lower price to people that had less money but determining that would be extremely complicated. Not only are some countries less wealthy that others, some institutions within a country are less wealthy and some individuals also.
Our solution, so far, is to provide our paid services at a single fixed price, but also to provide free services to as many people as possible (actually, our paid services enable us to expand and enhance our free services!). In this case, although you may not be able to attend the intensive 3-day workshops there is still a huge amount of training material available for you freely on the internet. This includes:
- All of the material that we cover in our three day courses Building better experiments with — Workshops for PsychoPy 2020 2020
- Our youtube channel – where we also aim to discuss most of what we cover in our workshops (I joined the team as staff in September, and have been working on this)
- More regular ‘open’ 3-hour sessions that are completely free (you can get on the mailing list for these here PsychoPy workshops waiting list or keep an eye out for events here Creating Experiments in PsychoPy (3 hours) — Workshops for PsychoPy 2020 2020 ).
Indeed, the revenue generated by those items we charge for do have benefits for all users. As one example, without the revenue generated from workshops and pavlovia, the team would likely have not been able to employ me to expand the free materials/workshops or the developers that now work full time on the project.
Sorry that we haven’t found a way yet to calculate a fairer per-customer calculation of price but we hope to keep providing you with tools that are considerably cheaper than any competing option, as well as free materials for all.
I hope that you can understand,
Becca