Compared to infrastructure projects, I think that consumer-facing open source projects are much easier in terms of finding users but much harder in terms of mon

Compared to infrastructure projects, I think that consumer-facing open source projects are much easier in terms of finding users but much harder in terms of monetization. My infrastructure pub/sub project is relatively popular https://socketcluster.io/ https://socketcluster.io/ but I can definitely see quite a few monetization opportunities (in addition to doing occasional consulting on the side) but I haven't capitalized most of the big opportunities yet - In a large part because my focus is still very much on adoption (which is often at odds with monetization). I think it will be possible to monetize it later through optional commercial plugins and performance optimizations. In terms of adoption, it's been steady linear growth since the beginning so it feels like constant struggle but at least it doesn't seem to be stopping; in fact it appears to be getting easier as time passes. I deal mostly with companies, startups and blockchain projects. That said, I've known authors of very popular back end software projects that have had a really hard time monetizing but I think this is because they were more like standards-compliant libraries than 'infrastructure'.