4 ms·

Do you know if projects that use the patreon style? Successfully or not?

• zrail 8y ago
  I personally know of zero that can support themselves and the other contributors with a system like Patreon.
• danShumway 8y ago
  Funding OSS on Patreon-like sites is really stinking hard[0]. There are not a ton of people making it work, although a few are close[1]. I suspect this is because OSS software on Patreon usually doesn't come with many actual benefits. One of the models I'm interested in playing with in the future is having Patreon-specific issue trackers and access to separate development repositories. In any case, you should not be trying to fund yourself purely through Patreon unless you have a good reason to believe you're going to be different. Kickstarter and crowdfunding on the other hand has been real promising.[2][3][4][5] I think there's strong evidence that OSS developers should consider charging upfront for feature development. It probably doesn't work for every type of project, but it seems to work for many types of projects. [0]: https://liberapay.com/explore/teams https://liberapay.com/explore/teams [1]: https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/ https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/fund/ [2]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-the-magical-git-client https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-th... [3]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-mark-ii-the-open-voice-assistant https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/aiforeveryone/mycroft-m... [4]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a... [5]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mbs348/diaspora-the-per...
  • acover 8y ago
    Thanks. What do you think of a subscription that gives you access to suggesting and up voting/down voting features?
    • danShumway 8y ago
      :) Is there a hosting service that supports it? This is the other problem I ran into trying to figure out how to get Patreon set up - Github and Gitlab have pretty broad permissions. It would be good to see people experiment with a wide variety of permissions surrounding issues, from access, to commenting, to creation, to upvoting. A lot of Open Source projects aren't even really looking for funding, but still want something in front of people who are just showing up to complain. I don't know of a public issue tracker that supports that kind of granularity though (if you do, let me know), so the next best thing I could find is to make a private group on Gitlab for development branches and issue tracking, and then to mirror everything to a public repo for stable releases with issues disabled. If anyone who works on Gitlab/Github is lurking around, it could potentially be a really cool differentiator to have those kinds of granular permissions.
• mperham 8y ago
  Vue.js is the only OSS success story on Patreon that I'm aware of. https://www.patreon.com/evanyou/ https://www.patreon.com/evanyou/
• qz3 8y ago
  Godot engine has hired full-time developers through Patreon backing. https://www.patreon.com/godotengine https://www.patreon.com/godotengine