I also wrote about this in some depth recently (but for maintainers): https://matt.life/writing/the-asymmetry-of-open-source https://matt.life/writing/the-asymm

I also wrote about this in some depth recently (but for maintainers): https://matt.life/writing/the-asymmetry-of-open-source https://matt.life/writing/the-asymmetry-of-open-source (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30706650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30706650) I'm glad Filippo is de-stigmatizing high-tier sponsorships: > Designing, building, managing, and growing an Open Source project demonstrates all the skills required of a Senior Software Engineer. That means maintainers can access $150k–300k++/year compensation packages.[1] > ... > $1,000/month without benefits is a nice way to show appreciation, but won't achieve any other goals. Smaller sponsorships do still contribute towards an overall paycheck, but aren't sufficient alone. While the majority of my sponsors are at $25/mo. (I should kindly mention that Filippo is one of them! For which I am very grateful.), I have tiers for $250, $1000, $6000, and $11000 per month as well [1]. I only have one or two total sponsors among the higher tiers. Currently, the majority of my expenses are covered by a single executive sponsor (ZeroSSL). The rest of my expenses are covered by independent professionals or small companies (which I also rely on -- thank you!) Without both the higher-tier and lower-tier sponsors, I would not be able to sustain a living working on Caddy. (By the way, sponsorships drop out on a regular basis, so it's always important to sign on new sponsors regularly.) So when I say to large companies: "You need an enterprise sponsorship to support your business use of Caddy," I mean it! It would take hundreds of $25/mo. sponsors to cover living expenses and match a senior engineer's salary, or it would only take a few enterprise sponsorships -- and it's way more affordable to sponsor along with a few other large companies than it is to bring the expert in-house exclusively. Ideally, we'd achieve a healthy mix of lower-tier and higher-tier sponsorships. Maintaining a large and complex project like an extensible, general-purpose web server is a lot of work and requires expertise I've spent almost a decade tediously accumulating. I don't want to have to find other work right now, and with hundreds of thousands of dollars of their revenue per hour relying on a web server that a student designed and developed after-hours in his senior year of college and spent years mastering since then, large companies depending on the project shouldn't want me to leave it either! After I got married last month, our open source sponsorships are suddenly supporting a family of five. Yet another reason -- albeit a more personal one -- that I strive to reach sufficient sponsorships: now I have something I care more about more than software. I really love working on Caddy every day. I hope it continues as companies continue to sponsor its development. [1]: https://github.com/sponsors/mholt https://github.com/sponsors/mholt