I write this together with my friend and core team member TD-er. We have a lot of big plans to improve and extend ESPeasy, not limited to the firmware itself. But first, let us give an update on the current status.
Me and TD-er started to help out with the project about spring 2017 when psy0rz was still active as the head developer. Early 2018 psy0rz told us that he didn't have the time to pursue any further development of ESP Easy. At that point me and TD-er informally took over the role as the lead developers for the project. Me as the front-end guy and TD-er as the back-end guy.
We have done this for the last year and have invested a lot of hours. And we DO WANT to spend hours on the project, we love every minute of it and we have some great ideas for the future. But development simply takes time. Because we're already out of free time and cutting down on sleeping time, there is only one option left, to cut down on working time.
Last week we also got the "owner rights" to the GitHub repository making us the official owner of the ESP Easy project.
So this is the moment we have to make important decisions, which will have to be discussed with our employers, our family and of-course you, the ESPeasy community.
So here we are. We have plans to start cutting down on time spent on our daytime jobs very soon but we need your help.
Essentially we need funding, if we can get that we will craft this firmware to a gem for IoT projects for years to come, and it will reach a point of simplicity that will make current versions look like Windows 3.11 compared to Windows 10 - very soon. (No jokes around that parable please

We will launch a new official website that will make use of a new forum engine and easier to maintain wiki sections making it as straight forward as can be to get going with ESP Easy.
We are discussing a lot on ways to remain able to pay the bills and still find more time to work on this project. If you can come up with other brilliant ideas, please share them. Winning the lottery was already offered as an idea, but more realistic ones are more than welcome.
One option of supporting us is through a support platform like Patreon. Via such a platform you decide what our involvement is worth and whether it is a one-time payment or periodical and you can always decide to reduce or increase the amount or simply stop your support at any time.
Do I get a "hallelujah"? If so, head over to our Patreon page right now and be a part of the future.
Thank you for all your support up until now and thank you for your future support.
https://www.patreon.com/GrovkillenTDer
If you prefer to "just" give us a coffee (not monthly, but one time only) you can add your support here: http://ko-fi.com/GrovkillenTDer