31 ms·

I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors

1469 points by calebporzio 6y ago

jcelerier 6y ago
since there's no such thing as a small advice - I'd appreciate a review of my sponsor page :-) https://github.com/sponsors/jcelerier https://github.com/sponsors/jcelerier
- LeonM 6y ago
  Hi Jean, I'm trying not to make this sound as a generic LinkedIn business advice, but get a better profile picture. Maybe a picture of you in front of one of the art pieces. Something that gives me an impression of who you are and what kind of art you collaborate in. It may sound stupid, but first impressions do really matter, even on Github. A dark, blurry picture of you drinking beer does not give a good impression.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > It may sound stupid, it definitely does not haha, I put a better pic. Thanks !
    - LeonM 6y ago
      Perfect! This gives a _much_ better impression on who you are (in a professional environment)
  - bnt 6y ago
    This. Oh my god this. I can't believe people put up a TikTok-value photo on a professional site and wonder why they aren't getting 6 figure offers - no matter how technical they are.
    - jcelerier 6y ago
      > I can't believe people put up a TikTok-value photo on a professional site That's interesting - for the longest time, for me Github wasn't anything related to the professional world, just a website to put the hobby OSS projects or uni group projects on. Things have obviously changed - it's nice to get a reality check regarding it.
- YorickPeterse 6y ago
  I'll join in as well! Please roast my profile here: https://github.com/sponsors/YorickPeterse https://github.com/sponsors/YorickPeterse
recursivedoubts 6y ago
Wow, that's a huge inspiration. I've been sitting on GitHub sponsorship setup for htmx, but this motivates me to get that done. It would be amazing to work on a passion project and get paid for it.
- stevekemp 6y ago
  I have a bunch of projects which seem to be popular, and a lot of followers. Income received via sponsorship? €0. I think a lot depends on luck, and the kind of repositories you manage/create. Some projects are obviously more commercially useful than others, and those are the easier ones to receive income from. https://github.com/skx/ https://github.com/skx/
  - recursivedoubts 6y ago
    yeah, like most technical stuff it seems like a lottery ticket, but if it's a lottery ticket that costs almost $0 it's worth at least setting it up...
  - cure 6y ago
    Thank you for xen-tools and xen-shell :)
jfengel 6y ago
Props. Well done. The thing that struck me most was the podcast appearance. I was distantly affiliated with the music industry at one point and I saw over and over the value of being in the right place at the right time. Great bands languish because they just weren't seen. I don't mean to diminish the work, either the technological or the effort of finding sponsors. I just want to caution about extrapolating success stories to utopianism. Success is more random than we'd like to believe, and there is a risk when failure leads to victim blaming.
- StevenRayOrr 6y ago
  > Success is more random than we'd like to believe, and there is a risk when failure leads to victim blaming. An excellent sentiment, if less common these days than it should be. Reminds me of a quotation from Chapter XXV[0] of Machiavelli's The Prince: "Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less." [0]: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm#link2HCH0025 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm#link2H...
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    Over the course of an entire lifetime, the random good vs bad luck tend to wash out and people usually end their lives financially roughly in line with their capabilities. - my personal opinion and experience.
    - quickthrower2 6y ago
      Our capabilities are also luck: genetics, access to education and compounding that the rich will enjoy more often. The homeless person from a broken home trying to stay alive is less capable of writing distributed software. On average. Yes there will be rags to riches stories that make great reads, and set the standard of the “insert country” dream.
    - cvlasdkv 6y ago
sitzkrieg 6y ago
these tend to come off like humble brags a bit considering working on the right thing at the right time is a big factor
- sbarre 6y ago
  How so? They took the time to share their story and itemize and outline the whole approach for anyone to read. Of course it's anecdotal and YMMV but to dismiss all the hard work and clear demand (people are paying) for the work by saying timing is a "big factor"? That seems unfair. Of course timing matters in all things, but all the timing in the world won't help if you don't put in the work, or build something that people want. Before someone points out an exception to the above, of course there are exceptions and people who get luckier than most, but this doesn't come across that way to me at all, and sharing the journey and the learnings is not something they had to do.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  I don’t know how you got that impression. The author is clearly humble. But bragging? I don’t agree at all.
- cj 6y ago
  It sounds like in his case, the biggest factors were: 1) Writing some software people need 2) Being very entrepreneurial / thinking of and trying different tactics to get people to sponsor him There‘a a bit of luck in the equation, but not a lot.
- tryptophan 6y ago
  Believing that everything is just luck is a great way to make sure you never encounter any.
  - danr4 6y ago
    oooh good one. saving it for future use.
stevens32 6y ago
It's inspiring to see that oss can provide a comparable income to the more traditional software engineering career path. It looks like some salesmanship is required, I wonder if there's some service out there that takes care of that aspect to help oss projects to find sponsors?
msoad 6y ago
$100k is still not even close to how much you can make in SV as an engineer. Specially an engineer at this caliber. But working on OSS full time is probably 100x more fulfilling than building CRUD for a boring ad company.
- naavis 6y ago
  You also don't need to live in the expensive SV area.
  - LeonM 6y ago
    This. In most parts of the world, $100k/year allows you to live very comfortably indeed.
    - negrit 6y ago
      Yes but the author is American So he'll always have to pay US taxes even if he moves out of the US.(I'm aware about tax treaties but in most cases they still have to pay the difference)
      - naavis 6y ago
        Most places inside the US allow you to live a comfy life with 100k/year too. No need to be in Silicon Valley.
        philliphaydon 6y ago
        Yes but being American he will be double taxed living outside of the US.
        nogabebop23 6y ago
        this is not true.
j7ake 6y ago
Congrats! Inspiring to see that you can make a living on your own without coding within a corporate structure.
blueterminal 6y ago
This is a really exciting project, can't wait to try it out. I love Laravel. Amazing job.
xgenecloud 6y ago
That's phenomenal! Hitting $100k in 5 months. Here is OP's repo - https://github.com/livewire/livewire https://github.com/livewire/livewire
bluedino 6y ago
Comparing $90k as a W2 employee doesn't really compare to making $112k as a LLC or contractor. Taxes, health insurance, retirement... On the other hand, his amounts are going up, so I'm interested to see how high they will go, and what it will consistently level out at.
- viklove 6y ago
  Comparing working as a W2 employee doesn't really compare to working as a contractor. Getting to choose your own hours, the direction of your project, who you get to work with, etc. is far more valuable to me than a bit more money.
  - cpitman 6y ago
    The article is the one that compared the two, saying that he now makes "more". It is completely correct that you cannot directly compare W2+Benefits to Contractor Revenue. The rule of thumb is to add 50% to a W2 salary to include health insurance and other benefits. So he is nearly there, but not yet.
  - bufferoverflow 6y ago
    I worked as a contractor in 1099 for years. It was exactly the same as W2, except I had to pay estimated taxes 4 times a year. I didn't get to choose hours, direction, who to work with. I think you're confusing it with personal projects.
    - balls187 6y ago
      > I didn't get to choose hours, direction, who to work with. There is nuance in that statement. The IRS has a test for whether a person is an employee or a contractor. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contractor-designation https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contr...
- jermaustin1 6y ago
  If you set the entity up correctly and work with a decent accountant, your $112k turns into more like $40k taxable, and if you are married, that $40k drops to $20k @ 10% + $20k @ 12% or ~ $4500 in taxes.
smeeth 6y ago
Step 1: create a repo with 4K stars...
- FlorianRappl 6y ago
  Or have several k Twitter followers ...
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Well, yes. Isn't it great to know that if you happen to create a repo with 4k stars it is possible to get something out of it besides random people hate?
- ghsthrw 6y ago
  Did a quick Google, looks like that comes to $2800. A small investment for 100k a year. https://gimhub.com/shop/buy-github-stars/ https://gimhub.com/shop/buy-github-stars/
_curious_ 6y ago
Nice, awesome achievement!
gdsdfe 6y ago
wow kudos, I also find it generous that github takes no cut on this giving that they offer the service. Some people here are comparing with the pay at FAANG, you'll have to factor in the satisfaction of seeing your own ideas coming to fruition and the fact that you are free to do whatever the hell you want, anytime, anywhere. Is that worth the 200k+ difference? maybe, maybe not, it's up to you.
adamzapasnik 6y ago
I'm not sure what is more impressive, the thought of 100k in 5 months from sponsorship or that the author ported a solution to another environment and got 100k sponsorship out of it? Wow, Good job! Not really understanding the comparison to SV salaries. This opens up many doors for the author, something that money wouldn't be able to do.
tluyben2 6y ago
The sponsorware idea was something we also want to do; - add sponsors as collaborators in the project - give sponsors access to all versions from the get-go - set a $ limit, when reached, will trigger full open-sourcing of the project - have public sponsor income page where people can follow the progress
FpUser 6y ago
Congratulations. Nicely done. Also you've mentioned github sponsors. Did not know about that program. It is severely restricted by small list of countries. Seems unfair as so many people contribute through github but looks like large chunk is unable to apply for this type of sponsorship because of location. Frankly I am quite disappointed with such policy.
MangoCoffee 6y ago
"Sponsorware" - it feel like open sourced shareware
rsweeney21 6y ago
Sponsoring the official screencasts/educational content for an open source project is a great idea. I run a company[1] that provides a service targeted at software engineers and I'd pay several hundred to several thousand a month to have a 30 second promo at the start of a video, depending on the size of the project. Is there a website out there where I can find content I can sponsor? Also, keep in mind that when you are self employed you need to make 20-30% more than your salary as an employee if you want the same take home pay. That covers the extra self-employment tax you have to pay, health insurance, business insurance, etc. If you charge by the hour, you might find this article on how to calculate an hourly rate helpful: https://help.facetdev.com/docs/how-do-i-calculate-my-hourly-rate https://help.facetdev.com/docs/how-do-i-calculate-my-hourly-... [1] Shameless plug: www.facetdev.com
- O_H_E 6y ago
  Although that doesn't sound like a bad idea, that is unfortunately not what he was talking about. By sponsors he meant patrons that get a perk of accessing screencasts when they subscribe (sponsor him).
wayneftw 6y ago
Gee, it sounds like using the proper channels works way better than trying to push trashy ads in an NPM postinstall script. Hopefully this story will help tone deaf people to make the right decision next time.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
NickBusey 6y ago
I hit $500/yr on Patreon this week for my open source work! :) Nice work, I should think about having paid only videos as well, I believe I can do that pretty easily on Patreon. Good tips in here.
- iandanforth 6y ago
  Lol I didn't notice there wasn't a 'k' in there and was really impressed for a moment.
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    I'm still impressed. It makes me happy to see that people are getting a bit of money for the value they bring us.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  Anybody have opinions/reasoning on Patreon vs Github Sponsors when it comes to open source work?
  - eXpl0it3r 6y ago
    The biggest difference would be that GitHub Sponsors has no fees [1], so everything people put in will go to the developer. Where Patreon can take 5-12% depending on the plan [2]. Additionally, GitHub is just so much closer to the actual open source work and more easily discoverable for users of your product. As a supporter, I'll pick GitHub over Patreon anytime. [1] https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source-community-with-github-sponsors/about-github-sponsors https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source... [2] https://www.patreon.com/product/pricing https://www.patreon.com/product/pricing
    - ehsankia 6y ago
      That's what I was surprised the most about. 0% cut and they also mentioned a 5k match? What? How is that even viable for Microsoft? That seems superior to basically every single platform out there. It's an instant win for GitHub Sponsors.
soheil 6y ago
For those wondering here is the repo in question and it has 4.5k stars https://github.com/livewire/livewire https://github.com/livewire/livewire
- zucker42 6y ago
  Did Github just undergo a design update? The buttons are flatter and it looks more like Gitlab to me now.
  - tnorthcutt 6y ago
    Yes
  - peterkos 6y ago
    Yep, unfortunatley. I left feedback the moment it entered "feature preview", left feedback on all the accessibility it lacked (mainly reducing contrast everywhere), and well, looks like they just rolled it out anyways. Really wish they would take things like people being able to see their product without difficulty seriously.
saos 6y ago
That was a nice reading experience
NetBeck 6y ago
It's always great to read of someone making a living from what they love and a community supporting each other.
game_the0ry 6y ago
Google should hire people like this. Wouldn't it be awesome if developer talent was judged on the impact of one's open source projects / contributions versus leetcode competency? Yeah, I know - it'll never happen.
- gutnor 6y ago
  Ignoring the fact that the majority of the source code is not open sourced and that "impact" biggest variable is going to be chance. Impact of one open source project measure slightly more than developer talent. It is a combination of a lot of skills, development skill just one among other like marketing, business sense, ability to make video, ... Extreme example would be Zuckerberg: is he the best developer in the world and wouldn't you waste a bit his potential if you hired him as a PHP dev? And in any case, impact is always going to be a star system. You are going to have a tiny percentage of developers (like a few thousands in the world) that have impact and all the other that have 0. You are back to square one at trying to find a way to differentiate between a loser that can code and another loser that cannot.
- ergocoder 6y ago
  Everyone wants to hire engineers like this. The problem is that developers like this are very very rare. They are superstars who can code and build communities. It doesn't happen because there aren't enough candidates.
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Kudos! I've been doing OSS for twenty years, and never made a dime. Qualifier: Never wanted to. It's always been a labor of love. Even when I have done a bit of commercial work (outside of what I did as a 9-5), I open-source that work, as well. I like doing OSS. I take pride in my craft, and like having it out there.
Ndymium 6y ago
Reading these makes me sad about the law in my country, Finland. The lowest tier of OP ($7 for no reward) would be illegal here. We have a law called "Money Collection act", which states that to gather donations (i.e. payments with nothing in return), you have to get a permit. This permit costs money, is not given to individuals, and is given only for non-profit activities. So this means that if you see a donation/sponsorship button on a software project where the money goes to a Finnish person, it is illegal (unless they have obtained a permit, which is highly unlikely). If you see a patreon/sponsorship with rewards, it's a grey area. The only clearly legal way is by selling actual things, and of course then you quickly need to set up a business. I host a free project myself and I've had to set up a business (sole proprietorship) and sell things in order to get money for server costs. Even though people have been interested in donating, I can't do that legally.
- zucker42 6y ago
  What is the ostensible purpose behind that law? Seems like something you could get changed (with considerable effort) considering there appear to be no strong interests who benefit from it.
  - rverghese 6y ago
    People pretending to be charities and scamming donations. The idea would be that all legitimate charities are registered and have a permit. If they don't, it's likely a scam.
  - Ndymium 6y ago
    I think it's originally to prevent scammers. Like if someone was collecting money door-to-door and then said that people willingly donated to them (which would be true). I think it's just to add oversight into those kind of situations and to prevent scam money collection campaigns.
- AlchemistCamp 6y ago
  How common are bootstrapped (i.e. non-wealthy, non VC-funded) entrepreneurs in Finland?
rglover 6y ago
Congratulations :) This is really inspiring and motivating for doing OSS work.
Hedja 6y ago
Since people are showing interest in GitHub Sponsors, I just wanted to mention: The types of services listed in the article likely falls under VAT in specific regions which can be a pain to calculate. That's one of the reasons I'm sticking with Patreon; they handle tax and chargebacks so the fee isn't a big deal. GitHub Sponsors explicitly says the tax is all on you. They don't mention chargebacks in their docs so it's hard to say, if they're processing the payment on their end, I'd guess they handle it. https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source-community-with-github-sponsors/tax-information-for-github-sponsors https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source...
andrew_ 6y ago
I have a few NPM packages that get millions of downloads per week. I collect about $5.50 US per month from Patreon and exactly $0 US from Github sponsors. I still consider that $5.50 a win.
vmception 6y ago
> Here’s how Sponsorware works: > Create a cool piece of software > Make it exclusive to people who sponsor you until you reach a certain number of sponsors > Then open source the project to the world This is how ICOs worked, for the teams that actually delivered anything. Without any other monetization path they resorted to taking presales of tokens shoehorned in convulated ways into products that didn't need them, but frequently involved open source code for a community. This resulted in many misaligned interests for people that eseentially were sponsors. It's nice to see the same sentiment reflected in other parts of the tech industry in a way that more people respect and can relate to.
- ViViDboarder 6y ago
  Or Kickstarter or any other kind of fundraising effort I guess. It’s a pretty cool adaptation of a fairly established practice.
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
Good work :). That's awesome.
iandanforth 6y ago
I'm not sure I fully understand the sponsorware model. Hopefully someone will educate me. If my costs for writing a piece of software are initially X, I'd hope to make at least X back before I open source it. (Ignore loss-leaders for now) If I'm counting number of sponsors, do I calculate them as if they will stick around for a year? 100% retention seems unlikely. Do I only open source after I've had Y sponsors for Z time such that sum(Y.donations) * Z == X? Then after I open source it I have ongoing costs. His experience seems to imply that educational content (paid) then also pays for ongoing maintenance costs. Is that correct? What if I later decide to stop supporting a project? Is there any mechanism to stop a stream of income from a group of sponsors, or will I have to assume they will "naturally" stop sponsoring when I kill new education content and updates to the project? This seems problematic as inertia will cause some people to keep paying despite not getting further value, which will cause some of them to be angry and demand "refunds." What if my project really takes off? What would be a possible path to scale from say 1-5 paid collaborators?
caniszczyk 6y ago
Sigh, GitHub is still promoting the "open source gig economy" https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-source-gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar/ https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-... It's been about 2 years of GitHub sponsors and they haven't shared any data on how well people are doing.
- foobar_ 6y ago
  That was an insightful link. But is it really the gig economy ? This seems more like the crowdfunding model, which is more applicable to arts and crafts. I remember first reading about radiohead or someone else using pre-order sales to get money and then release the album. There really needs to be an open data for business otherwise GDPR is pointless. Code is somehow not where the money is. What is peculiar about software is maintenance cost which puts it somewhere between crowdfunding and subscriptions. The gig economy makes sense if the person doing the gig is able to set the price otherwise it's not really fair.
ocdtrekkie 6y ago
The IRS website sometimes uses exact dollar amounts of reported tax information as identity verification. Author probably should replace screenshots of tax forms with rough figures.
truell20 6y ago
anyone tried running ads on their open source repos?
hirundo 6y ago
"All of this works because I spent years and years honing my craft and producing software that is truly useful. I’ve poured everything I have into that work, and there are no shortcuts there." This reminds me of Steve Martin's, "You Can Be a Millionaire ... and Never Pay Taxes": “You say, ‘Steve, how can I be a millionaire and never pay taxes?’” “OK first,” he explains, “get a million dollars.”
elchin 6y ago
How much would this person make if working at a big tech company?
omot 6y ago
I honestly think that platforms like Github and Patreon is the future of universal basic income. I think as labor becomes deprecated due to globalization and automation, more and more people are going to quit their jobs and pursue more creative and meaningful endeavors. Obviously in the beginning, power law will take into effect where a few people will have enough income to thrive in these platforms. I do think that these platforms will eventually have more features like pooled donation, say you could donate to a collective of creators that you care about, will lead to significant portion of the economy to more meaningful work.
- zanny 6y ago
  Proprietary rent seekers injecting themselves into paying for services so they can creme 5-20% off the top of all the money movement. Its basically the same thing credit cards do, but are more egregious because they also try to platform the creators. So you integrate them into one proprietary space you wholly control and can thus dominate industries by managing the purse. Its what almost every successful business nowadays does. Capture an audience and then shake down whatever they are coming to your platform for while holding the market ransom. Facebook and Google do this with advertisers, app / game stores with their 30% cuts, etc.
brightball 6y ago
This feels like a good place to mention the https://bytepack.io/ https://bytepack.io/ service that Jose Valim created. It's goal is to help with this type of thing.
spotlmnop 6y ago
Happy for you. Real talent deserves recognition. Thank you for everything you do. Keep up the good work.
ppod 6y ago
Off-topic question: Is Livewire comparable with RShiny, and is there anything that would let me do what Livewire does in python?
mschuetz 6y ago
Nice! I'm also already at 2$/month.
tomerico 6y ago
If Github sponsors proves to be a viable and scalable solution for OSS developers, this could spike a huge boost in quantity and quality of OSS. We've seen a similar effect with YouTube - by providing a monetization path for creators, it attracts talent, and allows them to finance a lifestyle around it. And it's a self-accelerating cycle - the growth in quality and quantity increases demand for the content which increases the quality and quantity.
- zepearl 6y ago
  I absolutely never heard anything about "Github sponsors" until now, which is actually what I always wished that somebody would create... . I thought as well (and still keep thinking) that if I'll ever manage to create something successful which generates $, then I'll share a part of the revenue with the (open-source) parts that my <whatever: app/website/etc...> uses/needs.
sytelus 6y ago
I hate sponsorware concept OP is proposing. It seems to work for him but it’s opposite to the spirit of open source. His idea is that keep code secret until you find N sponsors. Further, he will hide important tutorials if you are not sponsor. I would hate to use this kind of open source project. Here is more viable freelancing: - create framework/library that everyone needs - for feature requests/bug fixes, prioritize sponsors - do office hours for sponsors - invite sponsors/allow them to vote for future road map - offer consulting credit to sponsors
- sushid 6y ago
  That sounds more like straight up working to me. This way he's building features he's interested in and allowing some people to get a sneak peek, if you will. I'm not sure how sponsorware is the opposite to the spirit of open source but your proposal would essentially allow someone to buy out the product roadmap which seems worse.
- drummer 6y ago
  These are great ideas thanks.
- pselbert 6y ago
  What you're proposing requires him to sell his time instead of his work (which was already a portion of his time). It is impossible to scale that type of consulting work to multiple clients because you'll always be limited by your available time. The spirit of open source isn't so sacred. In most cases it is hundreds or thousands of businesses benefiting financially from the work you've done.
  - calebporzio 6y ago
    This exactly
    - calebporzio 6y ago
      I started the journey out (sorta) this way. It's a hard life.
zitterbewegung 6y ago
The next thing he could do was make a book out of his various projects and get some passive income. This is a really great and uplifting story!
drummer 6y ago
>Now, people watching the screencasts will naturally encounter these “private” screencasts and if they like the free ones, they will sponsor me (at $14/mo.) to get access. Why are we calling this 'sponsoring'? It just factually is selling a product to people for a specific amount. Sponsoring/donating is more like people giving money for something that would otherwise be free. Otherwise Microsoft could also require a 500 usd 'sponsorship or donation' for a Surface Go. And requiring it monthly is just plain subscription service payment.
- jlbnjmn 6y ago
  That was my reaction as well. He's selling courses using a freemium model. The software is the inbound content.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- codingdave 6y ago
  It is collecting money with an expectation of additional content in the future. So it isn't just a purchase. A subscription is closer, but sponsor adds the implication that your sponsorship is what allows the content creator to keep doing it. Also, one of the dictionary definitions for sponsor is: "provide funds for (a project or activity or the person carrying it out)." So it seems accurate enough of a term to me.
  - rootshelled 6y ago
    "provide funds for (a project or activity or the person carrying it out)." So does a subscription or purchase. So not sure what you are trying to imply with this. He gives access to stuff if you pay him money, with a promise of more stuff in the future. This just sounds like an subscription to me. While I do agree there is a disconnect between open source dev payment and business, I don't think mislabeling a subscription as a donation does anyone any good.
    - 6y ago
jglauche 6y ago
Any advise for a developer with disabilities who failed hard getting most of her projects out of 1-10 users phase if any?
wongarsu 6y ago
His data clearly shows most "sponsors" only sponsor him to view his webcasts. Is it really right to call that a sponsorship, as opposed to a subscription? What are the legal implications? (and yes, I'm aware that this is how most of patreon works too)
- kemitchell 6y ago
  I'm a lawyer, but I can't give legal advice here. See https://notlegaladvice.law/ https://notlegaladvice.law/. If you're interested in the issue, however, you might start by reading a little about "money transmitter" regulations. An early payments platform for open projects shut down at least partly on account of it. I suspect the concept of "perks" became widespread in part to differentiate fundraising platforms from money transmitters.
- laurent123456 6y ago
  In the UK at least this kind of revenue is taxable and hmrc doesn't really care if it's called donation, sponsorship or subscription. It makes a difference when it's a charity of course but open source projects usually are not.
kemitchell 6y ago
The more individual developer stories I look into on Sponsors or Patreon or wherever, the more I see a recurring pattern. The vast majority of developers don't make any significant money. The outliers that do use the platform as a general-purpose payment processor. They take donations, but they also sell things. The line between isn't terribly clear. The platforms help style all the payments as "donations" or "sponsorships" or "patronage". That avoids harshing the project vibe with overtly commercial overtones that turn off the financially immature and preternaturally entitled. But in reality, they're often really payments for products, services, access, and so on. Some people do simply donate, usually small dollars, and don't receive or care about "perks". Others buy the perks on offer specifically, as a simple exchange. Somewhere in between, people and companies may be inspired by donation-like feelings, but use the benefits to get their payments approved and expensed. It's hard to draw any broad conclusion from outliers. But it all points to there being strange value in muddying the concept of paying developers with a lot of ambiguity, on both the buy side and the sell side. It's like one of those statues that looks like one thing from one angle, and something completely different from another.
- hinkley 6y ago
  In class and race struggles it's not uncommon to see someone worry aloud about token individuals who are "allowed" to succeed out of proportion to their peers. It gives the rabble hope, which keeps them sedate. But the success rate barely exceeds attrition at the top of the pyramid. I don't think I personally will ever know if this is just an accident of the system (being happily exploited), planned, or a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. Enough notable success stories satisfies the Availability heuristic in your brain, but that often tricks you into thinking things are quite different than they actually are.
  - kemitchell 6y ago
    I agree there's a lottery-like dynamic in open software funding. The winner-outliers are well known, broadly remarked, and frequently advertised. The long, long tail of financial busts gets downplayed, though we all know it's there. Same for startups, by the by. I don't think it's necessary to personalize the rules, odds, and constraints that reinforce these outcomes. We could find individuals who see how it works and like it. But I haven't seen evidence to show they add up to any kind of conscious conspiracy. I'm more concerned about the smaller players who aren't winning and haven't seen how the game is skewed.
alexellisuk 6y ago
This is a success story for GitHub sponsors and I hope it will eventually become the norm and not a unicorn example. We are nowhere near this level with OpenFaaS and with a high level of churn. I also have a slight concern about the author’s sales tax liability in territories such as the US and the EU. Economic nexus is real, take a look at paddle.com if you want to know more. GitHub doesn’t collect sales tax - so you shouldn’t be selling any taxable benefits FWIW. My strategy so far has to turn the program into a weekly Insiders Update on the OSS projects I maintain along with regular feature length content on the industry and software. There’s around 130-140 individuals, I’d like to see that get to double the number. As for companies that use OpenFaaS in production, they do not pay any form of sponsorship or support. https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dangus 6y ago
What I’m confused about is how the Sponsorware is operationalized for people on the paid tier. How do you only release to people on your sponsor list?
oxAAAFFB 6y ago
The payment scheme of the future will be something where a digital product is created and then kept locked up until it’s unlocked by Kickstarter style fundraising. Each individual person gets something they want (the digital product) in exchange for their money, just like before. But under this model, everything might be open source by default, the product only costs society what it is worth (unlike current digital products like movies and songs) and the convoluted nightmare of drm and each-tv-network-has-their-own-subscription-service can finally die.
llIIllIIllIIl 6y ago
Congratulations!
gumby 6y ago
This is great, for a couple of reasons. One is that it works! I’m delighted for you. Second is that I haven’t heard of livewire because I work in a different area. This suggests that more folks will be able to do the same (admittedly livewire is in a popular space — which makes meeting this threshold harder, so congrats again)
muyuu 6y ago
I love his idea, the problem I have is that I hate github. Would it work outside of Github?
bgdkbtv 6y ago
Congrats dude! Living the dream! Been following you and your progress on twitter for a while
phodge 6y ago
Joel Spolsky does a good job of explaining what's actually happening here in his old "Strategy Letter V" from 2002 [1]. Caleb hasn't discovered some secret means of convincing people to pay for OSS they can download for free. What he's done is create a commodity (the open source package) and then once it's popular, make a tidy profit off its complimentary product (training videos). Unfortunately it's still true that people generally won't pay for software they can download for free, but if you're willing to dip into some other types of work (e.g. consulting, creating training videos) then you can make more than enough profit top keep going indefinitely. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- z3t4 6y ago
  I wonder if you could just pick a big open source product with a large community and sell complimentary product products for it... Or that you first must be a celebrity? Or at least have enough social proof.
  - phodge 6y ago
    I can't say I'm an expert on RedHad's business model, but I think this is what they've done with Linux. Mysql did something similar as well, but in their case they built mysql from scratch themselves rather than attaching to an existing product.
  - SifJar 6y ago
    Risk with that approach is that your complimentary products could become irrelevant or redundant as the open source project evolves e.g. training material could become outdated as functionality changes, a product that relies on some API could get broken by API changes etc. By owning both the open source project & the complimentary product, you can avoid nasty surprises (and be ahead of any competitors in the "complimentary product" space when you make changes in the open source project)
bjoernw 6y ago
Coil and Mozilla are working on something very similar to sponsorship but instead with micropayments that are streamed to content creator's wallets via a new open Web Monetization standard. https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started.html https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started.html Would be neat to see more sites adopt the web monetization standard via coil or other sites like it that enable content creators to offer paid content and get paid passively as more people discovered their content.
satya71 6y ago
numpy was the first project that I came across that used a similar technique to fund the development. The numpy book was available exclusively to funders until the early development was paid for. Travis Oliphant, the author of numpy and of the guide, went on to found Anaconda (Continuum Analytics).
alexmingoia 6y ago
> A few weeks later I added a new “private” group of screencasts for GitHub sponsors only. THIS is the secret sauce. The secret sauce is selling a product (in this case courses/training), and using GitHub sponsors as a payment gateway. It’s great, but it’s not really sponsorship. If you’re a dev with a popular open source project, you can profit by selling related training/courses. A lot of devs are probably leaving money on the table.
kabacha 6y ago
Stallman was right story once again, huh? He argued that the best way to monetize libre software is to sell training/education and 80% of OP's income come from the educational screen-casts. Maybe the lesson here is that if you want to earn money from libre software you have to learn how to create and sell training. I think this model is really beautiful — everyone wins: good software, good training material, strong communities and respect everyone's freedoms!
habosa 6y ago
Wow there’s so much negativity here. I just want to say congratulations. I think the sponsorware concept is very cool and could be good for the community. I’m glad someone has found a way to make money in open source.
vxNsr 6y ago
Fascinating story. About the project: is it basically a PHP library?
peter_d_sherman 6y ago
>"A few weeks later I added a new “private” group of screencasts for GitHub sponsors only. [ screenshot of a video being restricted to sponsors only ] THIS is the secret sauce."

1469 points by calebporzio 6y ago

since there's no such thing as a small advice - I'd appreciate a review of my sponsor page :-) https://github.com/sponsors/jcelerier https://github.com/sponsors/jcelerier

LeonM 6y ago
Hi Jean, I'm trying not to make this sound as a generic LinkedIn business advice, but get a better profile picture. Maybe a picture of you in front of one of the art pieces. Something that gives me an impression of who you are and what kind of art you collaborate in. It may sound stupid, but first impressions do really matter, even on Github. A dark, blurry picture of you drinking beer does not give a good impression.
- jcelerier 6y ago
  > It may sound stupid, it definitely does not haha, I put a better pic. Thanks !
  - LeonM 6y ago
    Perfect! This gives a _much_ better impression on who you are (in a professional environment)
- bnt 6y ago
  This. Oh my god this. I can't believe people put up a TikTok-value photo on a professional site and wonder why they aren't getting 6 figure offers - no matter how technical they are.
  - jcelerier 6y ago
    > I can't believe people put up a TikTok-value photo on a professional site That's interesting - for the longest time, for me Github wasn't anything related to the professional world, just a website to put the hobby OSS projects or uni group projects on. Things have obviously changed - it's nice to get a reality check regarding it.
YorickPeterse 6y ago
I'll join in as well! Please roast my profile here: https://github.com/sponsors/YorickPeterse https://github.com/sponsors/YorickPeterse

recursivedoubts 6y ago

Wow, that's a huge inspiration. I've been sitting on GitHub sponsorship setup for htmx, but this motivates me to get that done. It would be amazing to work on a passion project and get paid for it.

stevekemp 6y ago
I have a bunch of projects which seem to be popular, and a lot of followers. Income received via sponsorship? €0. I think a lot depends on luck, and the kind of repositories you manage/create. Some projects are obviously more commercially useful than others, and those are the easier ones to receive income from. https://github.com/skx/ https://github.com/skx/
- recursivedoubts 6y ago
  yeah, like most technical stuff it seems like a lottery ticket, but if it's a lottery ticket that costs almost $0 it's worth at least setting it up...
- cure 6y ago
  Thank you for xen-tools and xen-shell :)

jfengel 6y ago

Props. Well done. The thing that struck me most was the podcast appearance. I was distantly affiliated with the music industry at one point and I saw over and over the value of being in the right place at the right time. Great bands languish because they just weren't seen. I don't mean to diminish the work, either the technological or the effort of finding sponsors. I just want to caution about extrapolating success stories to utopianism. Success is more random than we'd like to believe, and there is a risk when failure leads to victim blaming.

StevenRayOrr 6y ago
> Success is more random than we'd like to believe, and there is a risk when failure leads to victim blaming. An excellent sentiment, if less common these days than it should be. Reminds me of a quotation from Chapter XXV[0] of Machiavelli's The Prince: "Nevertheless, not to extinguish our free will, I hold it to be true that Fortune is the arbiter of one-half of our actions, but that she still leaves us to direct the other half, or perhaps a little less." [0]: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm#link2HCH0025 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1232/1232-h/1232-h.htm#link2H...
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Over the course of an entire lifetime, the random good vs bad luck tend to wash out and people usually end their lives financially roughly in line with their capabilities. - my personal opinion and experience.
  - quickthrower2 6y ago
    Our capabilities are also luck: genetics, access to education and compounding that the rich will enjoy more often. The homeless person from a broken home trying to stay alive is less capable of writing distributed software. On average. Yes there will be rags to riches stories that make great reads, and set the standard of the “insert country” dream.
  - cvlasdkv 6y ago

sitzkrieg 6y ago

these tend to come off like humble brags a bit considering working on the right thing at the right time is a big factor

sbarre 6y ago
How so? They took the time to share their story and itemize and outline the whole approach for anyone to read. Of course it's anecdotal and YMMV but to dismiss all the hard work and clear demand (people are paying) for the work by saying timing is a "big factor"? That seems unfair. Of course timing matters in all things, but all the timing in the world won't help if you don't put in the work, or build something that people want. Before someone points out an exception to the above, of course there are exceptions and people who get luckier than most, but this doesn't come across that way to me at all, and sharing the journey and the learnings is not something they had to do.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
I don’t know how you got that impression. The author is clearly humble. But bragging? I don’t agree at all.
cj 6y ago
It sounds like in his case, the biggest factors were: 1) Writing some software people need 2) Being very entrepreneurial / thinking of and trying different tactics to get people to sponsor him There‘a a bit of luck in the equation, but not a lot.
tryptophan 6y ago
Believing that everything is just luck is a great way to make sure you never encounter any.
- danr4 6y ago
  oooh good one. saving it for future use.

stevens32 6y ago

It's inspiring to see that oss can provide a comparable income to the more traditional software engineering career path. It looks like some salesmanship is required, I wonder if there's some service out there that takes care of that aspect to help oss projects to find sponsors?

msoad 6y ago

$100k is still not even close to how much you can make in SV as an engineer. Specially an engineer at this caliber. But working on OSS full time is probably 100x more fulfilling than building CRUD for a boring ad company.

naavis 6y ago
You also don't need to live in the expensive SV area.
- LeonM 6y ago
  This. In most parts of the world, $100k/year allows you to live very comfortably indeed.
  - negrit 6y ago
    Yes but the author is American So he'll always have to pay US taxes even if he moves out of the US.(I'm aware about tax treaties but in most cases they still have to pay the difference)
    - naavis 6y ago
      Most places inside the US allow you to live a comfy life with 100k/year too. No need to be in Silicon Valley.
      - philliphaydon 6y ago
        Yes but being American he will be double taxed living outside of the US.
        nogabebop23 6y ago
        this is not true.

j7ake 6y ago

Congrats! Inspiring to see that you can make a living on your own without coding within a corporate structure.

blueterminal 6y ago

This is a really exciting project, can't wait to try it out. I love Laravel. Amazing job.

xgenecloud 6y ago

That's phenomenal! Hitting $100k in 5 months. Here is OP's repo - https://github.com/livewire/livewire https://github.com/livewire/livewire

bluedino 6y ago

Comparing $90k as a W2 employee doesn't really compare to making $112k as a LLC or contractor. Taxes, health insurance, retirement... On the other hand, his amounts are going up, so I'm interested to see how high they will go, and what it will consistently level out at.

viklove 6y ago
Comparing working as a W2 employee doesn't really compare to working as a contractor. Getting to choose your own hours, the direction of your project, who you get to work with, etc. is far more valuable to me than a bit more money.
- cpitman 6y ago
  The article is the one that compared the two, saying that he now makes "more". It is completely correct that you cannot directly compare W2+Benefits to Contractor Revenue. The rule of thumb is to add 50% to a W2 salary to include health insurance and other benefits. So he is nearly there, but not yet.
- bufferoverflow 6y ago
  I worked as a contractor in 1099 for years. It was exactly the same as W2, except I had to pay estimated taxes 4 times a year. I didn't get to choose hours, direction, who to work with. I think you're confusing it with personal projects.
  - balls187 6y ago
    > I didn't get to choose hours, direction, who to work with. There is nuance in that statement. The IRS has a test for whether a person is an employee or a contractor. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contractor-designation https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/understanding-employee-vs-contr...
jermaustin1 6y ago
If you set the entity up correctly and work with a decent accountant, your $112k turns into more like $40k taxable, and if you are married, that $40k drops to $20k @ 10% + $20k @ 12% or ~ $4500 in taxes.

smeeth 6y ago

Step 1: create a repo with 4K stars...

FlorianRappl 6y ago
Or have several k Twitter followers ...
marcosdumay 6y ago
Well, yes. Isn't it great to know that if you happen to create a repo with 4k stars it is possible to get something out of it besides random people hate?
ghsthrw 6y ago
Did a quick Google, looks like that comes to $2800. A small investment for 100k a year. https://gimhub.com/shop/buy-github-stars/ https://gimhub.com/shop/buy-github-stars/

_curious_ 6y ago

Nice, awesome achievement!

gdsdfe 6y ago

wow kudos, I also find it generous that github takes no cut on this giving that they offer the service. Some people here are comparing with the pay at FAANG, you'll have to factor in the satisfaction of seeing your own ideas coming to fruition and the fact that you are free to do whatever the hell you want, anytime, anywhere. Is that worth the 200k+ difference? maybe, maybe not, it's up to you.

adamzapasnik 6y ago

I'm not sure what is more impressive, the thought of 100k in 5 months from sponsorship or that the author ported a solution to another environment and got 100k sponsorship out of it? Wow, Good job! Not really understanding the comparison to SV salaries. This opens up many doors for the author, something that money wouldn't be able to do.

tluyben2 6y ago

The sponsorware idea was something we also want to do; - add sponsors as collaborators in the project - give sponsors access to all versions from the get-go - set a $ limit, when reached, will trigger full open-sourcing of the project - have public sponsor income page where people can follow the progress

FpUser 6y ago

Congratulations. Nicely done. Also you've mentioned github sponsors. Did not know about that program. It is severely restricted by small list of countries. Seems unfair as so many people contribute through github but looks like large chunk is unable to apply for this type of sponsorship because of location. Frankly I am quite disappointed with such policy.

MangoCoffee 6y ago

"Sponsorware" - it feel like open sourced shareware

rsweeney21 6y ago

Sponsoring the official screencasts/educational content for an open source project is a great idea. I run a company[1] that provides a service targeted at software engineers and I'd pay several hundred to several thousand a month to have a 30 second promo at the start of a video, depending on the size of the project. Is there a website out there where I can find content I can sponsor? Also, keep in mind that when you are self employed you need to make 20-30% more than your salary as an employee if you want the same take home pay. That covers the extra self-employment tax you have to pay, health insurance, business insurance, etc. If you charge by the hour, you might find this article on how to calculate an hourly rate helpful: https://help.facetdev.com/docs/how-do-i-calculate-my-hourly-rate https://help.facetdev.com/docs/how-do-i-calculate-my-hourly-... [1] Shameless plug: www.facetdev.com

O_H_E 6y ago
Although that doesn't sound like a bad idea, that is unfortunately not what he was talking about. By sponsors he meant patrons that get a perk of accessing screencasts when they subscribe (sponsor him).

wayneftw 6y ago

Gee, it sounds like using the proper channels works way better than trying to push trashy ads in an NPM postinstall script. Hopefully this story will help tone deaf people to make the right decision next time.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

NickBusey 6y ago

I hit $500/yr on Patreon this week for my open source work! :) Nice work, I should think about having paid only videos as well, I believe I can do that pretty easily on Patreon. Good tips in here.

iandanforth 6y ago
Lol I didn't notice there wasn't a 'k' in there and was really impressed for a moment.
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  I'm still impressed. It makes me happy to see that people are getting a bit of money for the value they bring us.
hanniabu 6y ago
Anybody have opinions/reasoning on Patreon vs Github Sponsors when it comes to open source work?
- eXpl0it3r 6y ago
  The biggest difference would be that GitHub Sponsors has no fees [1], so everything people put in will go to the developer. Where Patreon can take 5-12% depending on the plan [2]. Additionally, GitHub is just so much closer to the actual open source work and more easily discoverable for users of your product. As a supporter, I'll pick GitHub over Patreon anytime. [1] https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source-community-with-github-sponsors/about-github-sponsors https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source... [2] https://www.patreon.com/product/pricing https://www.patreon.com/product/pricing
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    That's what I was surprised the most about. 0% cut and they also mentioned a 5k match? What? How is that even viable for Microsoft? That seems superior to basically every single platform out there. It's an instant win for GitHub Sponsors.

soheil 6y ago

For those wondering here is the repo in question and it has 4.5k stars https://github.com/livewire/livewire https://github.com/livewire/livewire

zucker42 6y ago
Did Github just undergo a design update? The buttons are flatter and it looks more like Gitlab to me now.
- tnorthcutt 6y ago
  Yes
- peterkos 6y ago
  Yep, unfortunatley. I left feedback the moment it entered "feature preview", left feedback on all the accessibility it lacked (mainly reducing contrast everywhere), and well, looks like they just rolled it out anyways. Really wish they would take things like people being able to see their product without difficulty seriously.

saos 6y ago

That was a nice reading experience

NetBeck 6y ago

It's always great to read of someone making a living from what they love and a community supporting each other.

game_the0ry 6y ago

Google should hire people like this. Wouldn't it be awesome if developer talent was judged on the impact of one's open source projects / contributions versus leetcode competency? Yeah, I know - it'll never happen.

gutnor 6y ago
Ignoring the fact that the majority of the source code is not open sourced and that "impact" biggest variable is going to be chance. Impact of one open source project measure slightly more than developer talent. It is a combination of a lot of skills, development skill just one among other like marketing, business sense, ability to make video, ... Extreme example would be Zuckerberg: is he the best developer in the world and wouldn't you waste a bit his potential if you hired him as a PHP dev? And in any case, impact is always going to be a star system. You are going to have a tiny percentage of developers (like a few thousands in the world) that have impact and all the other that have 0. You are back to square one at trying to find a way to differentiate between a loser that can code and another loser that cannot.
ergocoder 6y ago
Everyone wants to hire engineers like this. The problem is that developers like this are very very rare. They are superstars who can code and build communities. It doesn't happen because there aren't enough candidates.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Kudos! I've been doing OSS for twenty years, and never made a dime. Qualifier: Never wanted to. It's always been a labor of love. Even when I have done a bit of commercial work (outside of what I did as a 9-5), I open-source that work, as well. I like doing OSS. I take pride in my craft, and like having it out there.

Ndymium 6y ago

Reading these makes me sad about the law in my country, Finland. The lowest tier of OP ($7 for no reward) would be illegal here. We have a law called "Money Collection act", which states that to gather donations (i.e. payments with nothing in return), you have to get a permit. This permit costs money, is not given to individuals, and is given only for non-profit activities. So this means that if you see a donation/sponsorship button on a software project where the money goes to a Finnish person, it is illegal (unless they have obtained a permit, which is highly unlikely). If you see a patreon/sponsorship with rewards, it's a grey area. The only clearly legal way is by selling actual things, and of course then you quickly need to set up a business. I host a free project myself and I've had to set up a business (sole proprietorship) and sell things in order to get money for server costs. Even though people have been interested in donating, I can't do that legally.

zucker42 6y ago
What is the ostensible purpose behind that law? Seems like something you could get changed (with considerable effort) considering there appear to be no strong interests who benefit from it.
- rverghese 6y ago
  People pretending to be charities and scamming donations. The idea would be that all legitimate charities are registered and have a permit. If they don't, it's likely a scam.
- Ndymium 6y ago
  I think it's originally to prevent scammers. Like if someone was collecting money door-to-door and then said that people willingly donated to them (which would be true). I think it's just to add oversight into those kind of situations and to prevent scam money collection campaigns.
AlchemistCamp 6y ago
How common are bootstrapped (i.e. non-wealthy, non VC-funded) entrepreneurs in Finland?

rglover 6y ago

Congratulations :) This is really inspiring and motivating for doing OSS work.

Hedja 6y ago

Since people are showing interest in GitHub Sponsors, I just wanted to mention: The types of services listed in the article likely falls under VAT in specific regions which can be a pain to calculate. That's one of the reasons I'm sticking with Patreon; they handle tax and chargebacks so the fee isn't a big deal. GitHub Sponsors explicitly says the tax is all on you. They don't mention chargebacks in their docs so it's hard to say, if they're processing the payment on their end, I'd guess they handle it. https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source-community-with-github-sponsors/tax-information-for-github-sponsors https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source...

andrew_ 6y ago

I have a few NPM packages that get millions of downloads per week. I collect about $5.50 US per month from Patreon and exactly $0 US from Github sponsors. I still consider that $5.50 a win.

vmception 6y ago

> Here’s how Sponsorware works: > Create a cool piece of software > Make it exclusive to people who sponsor you until you reach a certain number of sponsors > Then open source the project to the world This is how ICOs worked, for the teams that actually delivered anything. Without any other monetization path they resorted to taking presales of tokens shoehorned in convulated ways into products that didn't need them, but frequently involved open source code for a community. This resulted in many misaligned interests for people that eseentially were sponsors. It's nice to see the same sentiment reflected in other parts of the tech industry in a way that more people respect and can relate to.

ViViDboarder 6y ago
Or Kickstarter or any other kind of fundraising effort I guess. It’s a pretty cool adaptation of a fairly established practice.

PopeDotNinja 6y ago

Good work :). That's awesome.

iandanforth 6y ago

I'm not sure I fully understand the sponsorware model. Hopefully someone will educate me. If my costs for writing a piece of software are initially X, I'd hope to make at least X back before I open source it. (Ignore loss-leaders for now) If I'm counting number of sponsors, do I calculate them as if they will stick around for a year? 100% retention seems unlikely. Do I only open source after I've had Y sponsors for Z time such that sum(Y.donations) * Z == X? Then after I open source it I have ongoing costs. His experience seems to imply that educational content (paid) then also pays for ongoing maintenance costs. Is that correct? What if I later decide to stop supporting a project? Is there any mechanism to stop a stream of income from a group of sponsors, or will I have to assume they will "naturally" stop sponsoring when I kill new education content and updates to the project? This seems problematic as inertia will cause some people to keep paying despite not getting further value, which will cause some of them to be angry and demand "refunds." What if my project really takes off? What would be a possible path to scale from say 1-5 paid collaborators?

caniszczyk 6y ago

Sigh, GitHub is still promoting the "open source gig economy" https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-source-gig-economy-and-sustainability-tip-jar/ https://www.aniszczyk.org/2019/03/25/troubles-with-the-open-... It's been about 2 years of GitHub sponsors and they haven't shared any data on how well people are doing.

foobar_ 6y ago
That was an insightful link. But is it really the gig economy ? This seems more like the crowdfunding model, which is more applicable to arts and crafts. I remember first reading about radiohead or someone else using pre-order sales to get money and then release the album. There really needs to be an open data for business otherwise GDPR is pointless. Code is somehow not where the money is. What is peculiar about software is maintenance cost which puts it somewhere between crowdfunding and subscriptions. The gig economy makes sense if the person doing the gig is able to set the price otherwise it's not really fair.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago

The IRS website sometimes uses exact dollar amounts of reported tax information as identity verification. Author probably should replace screenshots of tax forms with rough figures.

truell20 6y ago

anyone tried running ads on their open source repos?

hirundo 6y ago

"All of this works because I spent years and years honing my craft and producing software that is truly useful. I’ve poured everything I have into that work, and there are no shortcuts there." This reminds me of Steve Martin's, "You Can Be a Millionaire ... and Never Pay Taxes": “You say, ‘Steve, how can I be a millionaire and never pay taxes?’” “OK first,” he explains, “get a million dollars.”

elchin 6y ago

How much would this person make if working at a big tech company?

omot 6y ago

I honestly think that platforms like Github and Patreon is the future of universal basic income. I think as labor becomes deprecated due to globalization and automation, more and more people are going to quit their jobs and pursue more creative and meaningful endeavors. Obviously in the beginning, power law will take into effect where a few people will have enough income to thrive in these platforms. I do think that these platforms will eventually have more features like pooled donation, say you could donate to a collective of creators that you care about, will lead to significant portion of the economy to more meaningful work.

zanny 6y ago
Proprietary rent seekers injecting themselves into paying for services so they can creme 5-20% off the top of all the money movement. Its basically the same thing credit cards do, but are more egregious because they also try to platform the creators. So you integrate them into one proprietary space you wholly control and can thus dominate industries by managing the purse. Its what almost every successful business nowadays does. Capture an audience and then shake down whatever they are coming to your platform for while holding the market ransom. Facebook and Google do this with advertisers, app / game stores with their 30% cuts, etc.

brightball 6y ago

This feels like a good place to mention the https://bytepack.io/ https://bytepack.io/ service that Jose Valim created. It's goal is to help with this type of thing.

spotlmnop 6y ago

Happy for you. Real talent deserves recognition. Thank you for everything you do. Keep up the good work.

ppod 6y ago

Off-topic question: Is Livewire comparable with RShiny, and is there anything that would let me do what Livewire does in python?

mschuetz 6y ago

Nice! I'm also already at 2$/month.

tomerico 6y ago

If Github sponsors proves to be a viable and scalable solution for OSS developers, this could spike a huge boost in quantity and quality of OSS. We've seen a similar effect with YouTube - by providing a monetization path for creators, it attracts talent, and allows them to finance a lifestyle around it. And it's a self-accelerating cycle - the growth in quality and quantity increases demand for the content which increases the quality and quantity.

zepearl 6y ago
I absolutely never heard anything about "Github sponsors" until now, which is actually what I always wished that somebody would create... . I thought as well (and still keep thinking) that if I'll ever manage to create something successful which generates $, then I'll share a part of the revenue with the (open-source) parts that my <whatever: app/website/etc...> uses/needs.

sytelus 6y ago

I hate sponsorware concept OP is proposing. It seems to work for him but it’s opposite to the spirit of open source. His idea is that keep code secret until you find N sponsors. Further, he will hide important tutorials if you are not sponsor. I would hate to use this kind of open source project. Here is more viable freelancing: - create framework/library that everyone needs - for feature requests/bug fixes, prioritize sponsors - do office hours for sponsors - invite sponsors/allow them to vote for future road map - offer consulting credit to sponsors

sushid 6y ago
That sounds more like straight up working to me. This way he's building features he's interested in and allowing some people to get a sneak peek, if you will. I'm not sure how sponsorware is the opposite to the spirit of open source but your proposal would essentially allow someone to buy out the product roadmap which seems worse.
drummer 6y ago
These are great ideas thanks.
pselbert 6y ago
What you're proposing requires him to sell his time instead of his work (which was already a portion of his time). It is impossible to scale that type of consulting work to multiple clients because you'll always be limited by your available time. The spirit of open source isn't so sacred. In most cases it is hundreds or thousands of businesses benefiting financially from the work you've done.
- calebporzio 6y ago
  This exactly
  - calebporzio 6y ago
    I started the journey out (sorta) this way. It's a hard life.

zitterbewegung 6y ago

The next thing he could do was make a book out of his various projects and get some passive income. This is a really great and uplifting story!

drummer 6y ago

>Now, people watching the screencasts will naturally encounter these “private” screencasts and if they like the free ones, they will sponsor me (at $14/mo.) to get access. Why are we calling this 'sponsoring'? It just factually is selling a product to people for a specific amount. Sponsoring/donating is more like people giving money for something that would otherwise be free. Otherwise Microsoft could also require a 500 usd 'sponsorship or donation' for a Surface Go. And requiring it monthly is just plain subscription service payment.

jlbnjmn 6y ago
That was my reaction as well. He's selling courses using a freemium model. The software is the inbound content.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
codingdave 6y ago
It is collecting money with an expectation of additional content in the future. So it isn't just a purchase. A subscription is closer, but sponsor adds the implication that your sponsorship is what allows the content creator to keep doing it. Also, one of the dictionary definitions for sponsor is: "provide funds for (a project or activity or the person carrying it out)." So it seems accurate enough of a term to me.
- rootshelled 6y ago
  "provide funds for (a project or activity or the person carrying it out)." So does a subscription or purchase. So not sure what you are trying to imply with this. He gives access to stuff if you pay him money, with a promise of more stuff in the future. This just sounds like an subscription to me. While I do agree there is a disconnect between open source dev payment and business, I don't think mislabeling a subscription as a donation does anyone any good.
  - 6y ago

jglauche 6y ago

Any advise for a developer with disabilities who failed hard getting most of her projects out of 1-10 users phase if any?

wongarsu 6y ago

His data clearly shows most "sponsors" only sponsor him to view his webcasts. Is it really right to call that a sponsorship, as opposed to a subscription? What are the legal implications? (and yes, I'm aware that this is how most of patreon works too)

kemitchell 6y ago
I'm a lawyer, but I can't give legal advice here. See https://notlegaladvice.law/ https://notlegaladvice.law/. If you're interested in the issue, however, you might start by reading a little about "money transmitter" regulations. An early payments platform for open projects shut down at least partly on account of it. I suspect the concept of "perks" became widespread in part to differentiate fundraising platforms from money transmitters.
laurent123456 6y ago
In the UK at least this kind of revenue is taxable and hmrc doesn't really care if it's called donation, sponsorship or subscription. It makes a difference when it's a charity of course but open source projects usually are not.

kemitchell 6y ago

The more individual developer stories I look into on Sponsors or Patreon or wherever, the more I see a recurring pattern. The vast majority of developers don't make any significant money. The outliers that do use the platform as a general-purpose payment processor. They take donations, but they also sell things. The line between isn't terribly clear. The platforms help style all the payments as "donations" or "sponsorships" or "patronage". That avoids harshing the project vibe with overtly commercial overtones that turn off the financially immature and preternaturally entitled. But in reality, they're often really payments for products, services, access, and so on. Some people do simply donate, usually small dollars, and don't receive or care about "perks". Others buy the perks on offer specifically, as a simple exchange. Somewhere in between, people and companies may be inspired by donation-like feelings, but use the benefits to get their payments approved and expensed. It's hard to draw any broad conclusion from outliers. But it all points to there being strange value in muddying the concept of paying developers with a lot of ambiguity, on both the buy side and the sell side. It's like one of those statues that looks like one thing from one angle, and something completely different from another.

hinkley 6y ago
In class and race struggles it's not uncommon to see someone worry aloud about token individuals who are "allowed" to succeed out of proportion to their peers. It gives the rabble hope, which keeps them sedate. But the success rate barely exceeds attrition at the top of the pyramid. I don't think I personally will ever know if this is just an accident of the system (being happily exploited), planned, or a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B. Enough notable success stories satisfies the Availability heuristic in your brain, but that often tricks you into thinking things are quite different than they actually are.
- kemitchell 6y ago
  I agree there's a lottery-like dynamic in open software funding. The winner-outliers are well known, broadly remarked, and frequently advertised. The long, long tail of financial busts gets downplayed, though we all know it's there. Same for startups, by the by. I don't think it's necessary to personalize the rules, odds, and constraints that reinforce these outcomes. We could find individuals who see how it works and like it. But I haven't seen evidence to show they add up to any kind of conscious conspiracy. I'm more concerned about the smaller players who aren't winning and haven't seen how the game is skewed.

alexellisuk 6y ago

This is a success story for GitHub sponsors and I hope it will eventually become the norm and not a unicorn example. We are nowhere near this level with OpenFaaS and with a high level of churn. I also have a slight concern about the author’s sales tax liability in territories such as the US and the EU. Economic nexus is real, take a look at paddle.com if you want to know more. GitHub doesn’t collect sales tax - so you shouldn’t be selling any taxable benefits FWIW. My strategy so far has to turn the program into a weekly Insiders Update on the OSS projects I maintain along with regular feature length content on the industry and software. There’s around 130-140 individuals, I’d like to see that get to double the number. As for companies that use OpenFaaS in production, they do not pay any form of sponsorship or support. https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis https://github.com/sponsors/alexellis

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

dangus 6y ago

What I’m confused about is how the Sponsorware is operationalized for people on the paid tier. How do you only release to people on your sponsor list?

oxAAAFFB 6y ago

The payment scheme of the future will be something where a digital product is created and then kept locked up until it’s unlocked by Kickstarter style fundraising. Each individual person gets something they want (the digital product) in exchange for their money, just like before. But under this model, everything might be open source by default, the product only costs society what it is worth (unlike current digital products like movies and songs) and the convoluted nightmare of drm and each-tv-network-has-their-own-subscription-service can finally die.

llIIllIIllIIl 6y ago

Congratulations!

gumby 6y ago

This is great, for a couple of reasons. One is that it works! I’m delighted for you. Second is that I haven’t heard of livewire because I work in a different area. This suggests that more folks will be able to do the same (admittedly livewire is in a popular space — which makes meeting this threshold harder, so congrats again)

muyuu 6y ago

I love his idea, the problem I have is that I hate github. Would it work outside of Github?

bgdkbtv 6y ago

Congrats dude! Living the dream! Been following you and your progress on twitter for a while

phodge 6y ago

Joel Spolsky does a good job of explaining what's actually happening here in his old "Strategy Letter V" from 2002 [1]. Caleb hasn't discovered some secret means of convincing people to pay for OSS they can download for free. What he's done is create a commodity (the open source package) and then once it's popular, make a tidy profit off its complimentary product (training videos). Unfortunately it's still true that people generally won't pay for software they can download for free, but if you're willing to dip into some other types of work (e.g. consulting, creating training videos) then you can make more than enough profit top keep going indefinitely. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

z3t4 6y ago
I wonder if you could just pick a big open source product with a large community and sell complimentary product products for it... Or that you first must be a celebrity? Or at least have enough social proof.
- phodge 6y ago
  I can't say I'm an expert on RedHad's business model, but I think this is what they've done with Linux. Mysql did something similar as well, but in their case they built mysql from scratch themselves rather than attaching to an existing product.
- SifJar 6y ago
  Risk with that approach is that your complimentary products could become irrelevant or redundant as the open source project evolves e.g. training material could become outdated as functionality changes, a product that relies on some API could get broken by API changes etc. By owning both the open source project & the complimentary product, you can avoid nasty surprises (and be ahead of any competitors in the "complimentary product" space when you make changes in the open source project)

bjoernw 6y ago

Coil and Mozilla are working on something very similar to sponsorship but instead with micropayments that are streamed to content creator's wallets via a new open Web Monetization standard. https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started.html https://webmonetization.org/docs/getting-started.html Would be neat to see more sites adopt the web monetization standard via coil or other sites like it that enable content creators to offer paid content and get paid passively as more people discovered their content.

satya71 6y ago

numpy was the first project that I came across that used a similar technique to fund the development. The numpy book was available exclusively to funders until the early development was paid for. Travis Oliphant, the author of numpy and of the guide, went on to found Anaconda (Continuum Analytics).

alexmingoia 6y ago

> A few weeks later I added a new “private” group of screencasts for GitHub sponsors only. THIS is the secret sauce. The secret sauce is selling a product (in this case courses/training), and using GitHub sponsors as a payment gateway. It’s great, but it’s not really sponsorship. If you’re a dev with a popular open source project, you can profit by selling related training/courses. A lot of devs are probably leaving money on the table.

kabacha 6y ago

Stallman was right story once again, huh? He argued that the best way to monetize libre software is to sell training/education and 80% of OP's income come from the educational screen-casts. Maybe the lesson here is that if you want to earn money from libre software you have to learn how to create and sell training. I think this model is really beautiful — everyone wins: good software, good training material, strong communities and respect everyone's freedoms!

habosa 6y ago

Wow there’s so much negativity here. I just want to say congratulations. I think the sponsorware concept is very cool and could be good for the community. I’m glad someone has found a way to make money in open source.

vxNsr 6y ago

Fascinating story. About the project: is it basically a PHP library?

peter_d_sherman 6y ago

>"A few weeks later I added a new “private” group of screencasts for GitHub sponsors only. [ screenshot of a video being restricted to sponsors only ] THIS is the secret sauce."