Subscriptions. If you're going to keep people permanently on staff, a steady revenue stream is required. Either the users will provide that (aligning the incent

Subscriptions. If you're going to keep people permanently on staff, a steady revenue stream is required. Either the users will provide that (aligning the incentives of the company with the users, since financial performance directly correlates to customer satisfaction), or other companies will, in the form of ad spend, corporate partnerships, cross-promotion, whatever. Possibly the more sustainable model overall is for software to become a gig job, where engineers get paid for the features they deliver and there's only a skeleton crew of maintainers keeping the project on track (to keep the ongoing costs minimal). To offset the cost to users even further, you could potentially apply for government grants, at least in Europe. Or corporate sponsorships in some places, in the vein of the Django Software Foundation.