It's not about the code. I'm not bad at Patreon (around $750/mo, have an open source goal at $800/mo) but it seems like code is fungible, and it's not worth pay

It's not about the code. I'm not bad at Patreon (around $750/mo, have an open source goal at $800/mo) but it seems like code is fungible, and it's not worth paying a person just to code. The position to be in (and I think this will work for me) is to have a vision and essentially be the leader for that vision. Then, rather than getting paid to do what might be pretty ordinary code, you're getting paid because you're communicating a vision, one that's coherent and exciting to people. What helps me is that I'm legitimately one of the vanguard developers in digital audio and have been for many years. It shows in my work, and that work isn't mainstream, and I'm able to communicate what's being discovered (for instance, the significance of repeated quantization of mantissa in floating-point representation: people behave as if you have infinite resolution because you can represent an infinitesimal value, but of course that's meaningless around 1.0f) Just coding is NOT enough, and in fact having high value is not enough either. You have to get people to want to support your vision (or indeed personality, for the youtubers: and that holds for other types of creators as well). I will do substantially worse when I go open source than when I was keeping things proprietary, just as I did worse going Patreon than I did when I was selling my stuff at $50 a pop. I'm doing the open source goal (and it's designed to be a trickle of source rather than a sudden throwing open of the gates) because it's the right thing, and that's in line with my brand (or, the way I represent myself). I just have to manage the transition in such a way that I, personally, survive this doing of the right thing. That's not a given, but I think I can do it. Never Patreon, or open source, in the belief that it is helping you. It's helping the world. Done unwisely, it can hurt or kill you if your resources can't withstand serious poverty.