I’m glad it’s here. The author’s article on quitting their job resonates with me. I’ve started wondering whether it’s possible to make a living working on the things that I personally think are important, that I mostly have to push aside during typical employment (working on them in my spare time). Posts like this show that it’s possible and are food for thought on how to achieve it.
I copied only having discussions from Caleb. It has been a good approach for me. Most of the interactions I get from users are misunderstood support requests (often pretending to be bug reports), so I just retag them and then decide if I feel like answering or not.
After looking at the breakdown, I feel like the title is disingenuous:
Where did that milly come from exactly? Here’s the back-of-a-napkin breakdown:
5k: Goodness of their hearts “buy me coffee” sponsors
5k: Sold a bunch of stickers once lol
20k: Early access to a side project called “Sushi”
25k: Hourly consulting
20k: Alpine conference (I made $0 from this though)
200k: Companies paying me to put their logos on my websites and such
725k: Livewire premium screencasts
How does that equate to $1MM from GitHub Sponsors? Sounds like $795k from selling services, and $205k from sponsors.
Still cool, but like I said, title seems disingenuous.
Put the videos on your documentation site. Link to them from other docs pages. Give 10-20 videos away for free. Make them log-in with GitHub and become a sponsor for the rest.
Bing. Bang. Boom.
I still make most of my money from this strategy and I almost never show my face or do any fancy editing or graphics. I just make the content as good as I can and that’s what people ultimately care about.
They become a sponsor, they get access to the screencasts, that’s where most of the money comes from.
Ah. So they’re essentially using GitHub as a payment processor? IIRC, GitHub doesn’t charge any fees to the sponsoree (they charge them to the sponsor), so kind of smart tbh.
But my point is that people are paying for perks, i.e. services, not simply sponsoring the project.
It looks like it, yeah — keeping it tied to the platform like this seems like a smart move for a whole lot of reasons. Even if you’re no longer make active use of the particular “benefit” conferred, it’s so directly linked to the project/Open Source™ that perhaps you’ll feel less inclined to stop sponsoring it while still depending on it, even if you only started to get the casts.
GitHub Sponsors does not charge any fees for sponsorships from personal accounts, so 100% of these sponsorships go to the sponsored developer or organization. GitHub Sponsors charges a fee of up to 6% for sponsorships from organization accounts. The 6% fee is split between the following:
3% credit card processing fee
3% GitHub service processing fee
I can confirm as a sponsoree, too, that Stripe doesn’t sneakily skim anything off of what GitHub reports you’re getting.
I’ve thought about trying to emulate parts of this, but I’m put off by the way it paywalls content. If I spend time putting together a screencast I want as many people as possible to be able to see that - I consider it as valuable documentation and marketing for my projects.
I guess the larger question is how repeatable this model is. How many open source developers might be able to sustain their projects through paid content like this? Would the model become less effective if many more people were trying to do that, or is there still an enormous under-served market for these kinds of perks?
If your code is FLOSS, and all docs are open, and 10-20 screencasts are available for free, I’d say it’s fine to charge for additional screencasts. And apparently, that made him 725k $.
Would the model become less effective if many more people were trying to do that
I don’t think so. The world is probably big enough for many such projects.
And you always have the option of timing out the paywall for content. For example, you release it for free after a year behind the paywall. It doesn’t have to be a binary choice.
I’m sure Caleb, being from the Laravel ecosystem, was heavily influenced by Laracasts. These are premium, very beginner friendly, paid videos that help you learn Laravel. Laravel is also known for its excellent docs, so these paid videos were very much complementary content.
Cool article overall, but I can’t help feeling that these two pieces of advice are contradictory:
Keep it real: Kind of the last point. Just be yourself in everything you do. Talk to people like they’re already your friend. You’ll end up attracting other authentic people and you’ll make a bunch of friends that you’ll have for years and years.
Tag new major versions: You may be totally happy with your software and see it as a beautiful thing, but if you never release new major versions with ceremony, your project will start to feel stale. […] So just keep your thing feeling new, even if it’s not a fundamental shift. You could literally just tag a new version, redesign your landing page, and crap out a tweet with flame, rocket, and tada emojis. Oh don’t forget sparkle emojis too.
Just be yourself, but also make arbitrary changes that take advantage of peoples’ recency bias to make your project seem more exciting than it is?
Unfortunately it’s really hard to “sell”, uh, being a very chaotic contributor-to-everything with rather obscure random interests such as “getting stuff to work on FreeBSD/aarch64” and whatnot…
For TiddlyPWA I did add “supporter keys” (more than anything, as an excuse to use Patreon’s “store” feature as a one-time donation mechanism) and got a couple hundred dollars so I can confirm that “sell people things” does work.
The learning from this, and other related things I see around the web is that as a solo “entrepreneur”, your best bet is doing something with PHP. Make fun of it as much as you want, it pays for lambos and brings in millions.
Since someone has (previously) flagged this as spam, I’d like to explain why I submitted it:
I found it interesting and unexpected that people would pay to watch screencasts where he shows how to use his open source software.
He also mentions that he disfavors issues, and instead mainly uses discussions for his projects. I think that’s an interesting approach.
I’m glad it’s here. The author’s article on quitting their job resonates with me. I’ve started wondering whether it’s possible to make a living working on the things that I personally think are important, that I mostly have to push aside during typical employment (working on them in my spare time). Posts like this show that it’s possible and are food for thought on how to achieve it.
I copied only having discussions from Caleb. It has been a good approach for me. Most of the interactions I get from users are misunderstood support requests (often pretending to be bug reports), so I just retag them and then decide if I feel like answering or not.
After looking at the breakdown, I feel like the title is disingenuous:
How does that equate to $1MM from GitHub Sponsors? Sounds like $795k from selling services, and $205k from sponsors.
Still cool, but like I said, title seems disingenuous.
I dunno, maybe read the whole article?
They become a sponsor, they get access to the screencasts, that’s where most of the money comes from.
Ah. So they’re essentially using GitHub as a payment processor? IIRC, GitHub doesn’t charge any fees to the sponsoree (they charge them to the sponsor), so kind of smart tbh.
But my point is that people are paying for perks, i.e. services, not simply sponsoring the project.
It looks like it, yeah — keeping it tied to the platform like this seems like a smart move for a whole lot of reasons. Even if you’re no longer make active use of the particular “benefit” conferred, it’s so directly linked to the project/Open Source™ that perhaps you’ll feel less inclined to stop sponsoring it while still depending on it, even if you only started to get the casts.
Interestingly, there’s no fees whatsoever for sponsorships from personal accounts; only for those from organisations:
I can confirm as a sponsoree, too, that Stripe doesn’t sneakily skim anything off of what GitHub reports you’re getting.
GitHub charges no fees on either side for sponsorships from individual accounts (last month I received $30, and I withdrew £23.27 [30.62 USD today]).
They charge 6% or 3% for sponsorships from organizations
https://docs.github.com/en/sponsors/getting-started-with-github-sponsors/about-github-sponsors
Massive respect to Caleb for pulling this off.
I’ve thought about trying to emulate parts of this, but I’m put off by the way it paywalls content. If I spend time putting together a screencast I want as many people as possible to be able to see that - I consider it as valuable documentation and marketing for my projects.
I guess the larger question is how repeatable this model is. How many open source developers might be able to sustain their projects through paid content like this? Would the model become less effective if many more people were trying to do that, or is there still an enormous under-served market for these kinds of perks?
I mean… if you want to monetize, you have to paywall something. Very few projects can live off charity.
If your code is FLOSS, and all docs are open, and 10-20 screencasts are available for free, I’d say it’s fine to charge for additional screencasts. And apparently, that made him 725k $.
I don’t think so. The world is probably big enough for many such projects.
And you always have the option of timing out the paywall for content. For example, you release it for free after a year behind the paywall. It doesn’t have to be a binary choice.
I’m sure Caleb, being from the Laravel ecosystem, was heavily influenced by Laracasts. These are premium, very beginner friendly, paid videos that help you learn Laravel. Laravel is also known for its excellent docs, so these paid videos were very much complementary content.
Cool article overall, but I can’t help feeling that these two pieces of advice are contradictory:
Just be yourself, but also make arbitrary changes that take advantage of peoples’ recency bias to make your project seem more exciting than it is?
Framing it as…
Well, there’s definitely a conflict. But it’s a conflict you are inserting, not something present in the original text.
Consider this alternative framing…
There’s no conflict here. These points are mutually reinforcing.
The tendency of many in the programming community to read these sorts of situations as more like the first framing is a bit of a problem.
Unfortunately it’s really hard to “sell”, uh, being a very chaotic contributor-to-everything with rather obscure random interests such as “getting stuff to work on FreeBSD/aarch64” and whatnot…
For TiddlyPWA I did add “supporter keys” (more than anything, as an excuse to use Patreon’s “store” feature as a one-time donation mechanism) and got a couple hundred dollars so I can confirm that “sell people things” does work.
The learning from this, and other related things I see around the web is that as a solo “entrepreneur”, your best bet is doing something with PHP. Make fun of it as much as you want, it pays for lambos and brings in millions.
Best thing I have seen in a long time. Well done. 😀