Option in settings to remove Ads

• Etcher version: 1.4.9
• Operating system and architecture: Mac OSX
• Image flashed: fincm3
• Do you see any meaningful error information in the DevTools? No

I would like the team to consider adding a feature in the settings panel to choose not to show the Ads that show up in Balena-Etcher when flashing an image. I find the functionality distracting and taking up unnecessary screen real estate when I’m monitoring my image flash progress.

Thanks!

[alexandrosm]

Hey there, balena founder here. The balena team (formerly known as resin.io) started and to this day develops etcher, paying full time developers, servers, bandwidth, etc, while fully open sourcing the project and offering it for free to everyone.

We’re trying to find a model that justifies us continuing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on development of etcher while keeping it free and open source. We feel that the featured project is interesting to the maker audience (this isn’t exactly a McDonald’s ad) while helping us at balena promote our other products which are also very interesting to the same folks that use etcher. As a data point, many many people read the project page every day, and many hundreds have signed up and are building projects with balena cloud. This confirms for us that the featured project indeed useful and interesting.

The next steps we want to make is to feature third party projects, not just ones made by the balena team.

We also want to continue to iterate on the UI to make it blend better, we know there’s usability concerns, this is still an early phase of the effort. For the next iteration we want to make sure the UX is better, especially for people who are writing up tutorials

[starquake]

I’m still contemplating if getting annoyed by this is fair or not.

But to me it feels like my favorite no-nonsense image writing tool just gained nonsense…