That's awesome. Not knocking it at all, but for others, comparing the $100k from GitHub sponsors to a corporate-type salary isn't always straightforward. You would have to consider a lot of things, especially in the US. Things like 401k matching, cost of health insurance for a 1-man company versus as an employee, vacation and sick time, and other benefits. Oh, and self-employment tax (ouch). And a few other items like carrying your own liability insurance if needed, other expenses you might have as a freelancer, etc.
Again, not diminishing the accomplishment at all...very impressive.
Some tips.. As I've made up for loss of benefits, etc. in other ways after going self-employed. I've always done my own taxes so was comfortable with that aspect.
- Everything is deductible, your computer, home work space, etc.. They have phased out most deductions for employees.
- Max your 401k if you can (~55k Solo 401k) - this will make up for SE tax AND reduce your AGI so you can be less likely to be income phased out of certain benefits.
- Move to a state income tax free state, if feasible. Saved me $10k/yr.
- Look into short-term health plans. They aren't ACA, but have very desirable terms. For instance, marketplace plan for me 8700 deductible, 16000 out of pocket max was $550. Short term plan $2500 deductible $2500 out of pocket max (just no ACA protections/benefits) was $330 and is ALSO tax deductible, so more like $240. Networks are similar for instance mine is United Healthcare national network.
Sorry, Florida is full. We have lots of hurricanes and gators and bugs and crazies. Please retreat north, which has "seasons" and mountains and things. I hear the hipsters up there make great beer.
Florida is a never. They’re truly trying to completely dismantle public education.
In a lot of parts (suburbs & such) people will ask anybody new they notice what church you go to. If your answer is anything other than a church you actually go to, word will spread pretty quickly & they’ll genuinely harshly look down upon you. This is overwhelmingly upper middle aged to elderly, but some of their kids follow suit.
It’s a fuckin swamp. Humans were not very made to live in swamps.
Without trying to sound more xenophobic than this already does - the Cubans need a generation or two more away from Castro… some of them are quite openly insane about perceived issues that don’t actually exist in our country.
Pipeline to prison is very real & social safety nets are non existent. It very much pushes people to either kill themselves or become very… unfortunate people to find yourself having to deal with. That said, most humans don’t go the route of killing themselves (a good thing) so you have a lot more of the latter.
Police like to think they’re Wild West cowboys & they get the authority to execute you with no repercussions faster than barbers get licenses to cut hair. Training with their weapons less time than a boy scout took to get a (weapons related) badge.
Sorry for the rant. Florida is one of the rudest awakenings for many who move there with happier ideals in mind. Much worse than a lot of Texas.
It’s a joke. There’s not actually CRT in the math books. None of their voter base is actually going to open up a math book and realize that though.
This is actually a pretty simple one… most textbooks are made in Texas, somewhat controlled by republicans. They’re just banning anything they’re not getting a cut of the profits from & bringing in/giving their friends new textbook contracts.
>It’s a joke. There’s not actually CRT in the math books. None of their voter base is actually going to open up a math book and realize that though.
I'm assuming you are arguing in good faith and have read every page of every math book that is banned to confirm yourself. You surely couldn't be accusing others of not confirming themselves while you do the same thing.
And since you have read everyone of those books you could provide links to the books so we could also confirm ourselves.
>This is actually a pretty simple one… most textbooks are made in Texas, somewhat controlled by republicans.
Just because textbooks are made in Texas doesn't mean Republicans control their content. Do you believe every book written in Texas aligns with the views held by Republicans?
>They’re just banning anything they’re not getting a cut of the profits from & bringing in/giving their friends new textbook contracts.
Make a nice cup of tea & hop on the search engine of your choice for all the proof you’d like. I promise it won’t take much of your time, but I’m not going to be your personal source compiler.
If you personally looked at the books you could actually point me to some site with PDFs.
If you want to convince anybody maybe you should provide a source, especially since as you say it won't take much time.
I assume you are just a hypocrite who wanted to accuse the other side of doing the same thing you did and for caught and as such I'm not going to waste my time trying to prove your claim for you.
Believe it or not, a large amount of older men in India have been quite reluctant to start using toilets because going out and defecating on the streets was one of the ways community was formed & men felt they could spend time talking to each other & about their problems.
North Carolina won't have cheap homes for long. Housing prices are already skyrocketing, and several big tech companies are building new offices in the Triangle. NC is going to befall the same fate as Austin and every other once-affordable area that tech moved into.
As the “show me” state, Missouri does not tax the income generated by Twitch hot tub streamers and OnlyFans content creators, but the viewers pay an ogling tax based on tracking eye movements.
That's a good follow-up, with the quibble that the math is wrong -- he added $7.5k for insurance as a benefit for a salaried employee, then also subtracted it as an additional expense for being self-employed. So he double-counted it. Which is odd, given that he didn't use the same logic when talking about the other benefits he lists, like vacation, 401(k) matching, and equipment. Either he should have subtracted all of those from the self-employed amount, or added them all to the salaried amount, but not both.
So really, the difference in take-home pay should be $98,058 vs. $77,842. Or to put in terms of gross revenue ("Total Income", as he puts it), the comparative target number for self-employed people would be $132,371. It doesn't negate his overall point, I just figured I'd mention it.
Good catch, though any decent health insurance you can get on your own would be quite a lot higher than $7.5k/year. What I currently pay ~$500/month for via work used to be $2k+/month when I was self-employed. So in real-life it wouldn't always be a wash.
> Good catch, though any decent health insurance you can get on your own would be quite a lot higher than $7.5k/year.
I mean, my salary contribution to paying the company-sponsored health plan is ~$2K/month, so 14K/year. That's with my employer paying the other ~half of the cost!
It is also a lot easier to get cancelled and deplatformed. There needs to be the equivalent of a golden handcuff/insurance for crowdfunded content creators.
This sounds less like making money from open source alone and more about running a subscription video tutorial service.
The guy from laracasts has lots of open source code on GitHub but it would be weird to say he's making money from open source. He's making money selling a subscription to a video tutorial website.
The author has just swapped out Stripe or another payment gateway for GitHub Sponsors.
I'm not sure how this is any different from Laracasts or any other tutorial site other than the fact that he does make some money directly from the open source, but it's not enough...
Even on the enterprise level, all the open source companies such as Elastic Search or MongoDB don't make money on "open-source", but enterprise subscriptions, which would include support and some guarantees on the product, including stupid acceptance of your PR for fixing some bugs. And Amazon, Microsoft, Google use their open source to bring customers to cloud or sell some other products.
People don't like to pay for what is "free". Have you seen any street performance? The artists have to walk to every viewer and look them in the eye to ask for money, they have to keep some money in the hat in specific bills so people around kind of understand how much to pay, they have to keep their own viewers who definitely put money in the hat all the time, so others feel the pressure.
That is the reason why I personally don't want to run any open source projects. I just don't like to ask people. I would never want to ask anybody to contribute, I don't want to find a way to make it profitable. Not saying that it is bad, I just feel so much pressure for asking people to do something. To help, to support, to try to sell something to them.
I am running pretty much 2 companies with close source software. One is very successful, which pay my bills, another one is more like a moonlight project, that makes around $1k to $2k a month (currently contribute most of that to various foundations to support Ukraine). And for the last 5 years I got used to being ok for blame not to write any open source projects. I personally don't use much open source software myself. Not for the reasons I don't want to, just because I am ok to pay for quality. And I don't have time to review some libraries, when I can just write something in a day or two.
I don't sell my software, I publish on Reddit, and other channels about something I do, run promotions, but don't talk to customers to sell anything. All my software is easy to download and try, and purchase without talking to me. But if you are my customers, I would be happy to help you.
If people can only get the software by buying it, you are pretty much "asking" them to do something. Just because you are not interacting with them does not mean you are not doing sales.
> 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
Not really AlpineJS and Livewire are both highly popular and people are paying him for maintaining it. He makes podcast and occasional videos but it all revolves around those two tools. He is diversifiing by making and selling new product - Alpine Components but again that revolves around software he makes.
The Laracast guy will make videos about anything and the open source soft is mainly sideeffect of him being developer.
Your reminder that if you live in Europe and want to stay on the right side of your tax authority then what Caleb did is likely breaking the law in your country without some extra steps.
Why? If you offer incentives in return for sponsorship (e.g. extra videos) this turns it from a donation to a business transaction. That has tax implications - and you need to know which country the people sponsoring you live in to bill the right tax.
The easiest way to do something like this as a European is to use something like MyCommerce to sell your stuff. They take care of VAT for you, and you don't need to do anything. Of course, they charge a percentage of your revenue for the privilege.
(I've tried Fastspring too, but I vastly prefer MyCommerce. MyCommerce sends you proper invoices every month that make tax reporting trivial for EU businesses. With Fastspring you have to export lots of CSV files and do lots of work in Excel to get the data you need)
I don't work for MyCommerce, I just use them to sell stuff. I think they are also somewhat popular in the audio community (selling plugins etc). I think they are owned by Digital River now, but the nice thing is that I get invoices and payments from a German company, which makes accounting really easy for EU businesses.
Fastspring is a decent option, but support is really bad, and I had some issues early on where they paid out 5-10% less than they owed me, and said they don't know why and think it's because of exchange rates between USD and EUR.
I can't say anything about Paddle, I think they're a UK company, so after Brexit it's not the best value proposition. I refuse to try them because of their pushy sales people, at one point they were sending me multiple emails a week to try to get me to switch from Fastspring to them, and didn't stop even after I complained.
As for Gumroad, last time I checked they didn't handle VAT, but that's a long time ago so maybe that's changed now?
Both Paddle and Gumroad are cheaper than Fastspring. Both are Merchant of Record and take care of taxes. Gumroad included. Paddle is straight 5% always. Not sure Gumroad starts at 10% but it goes down if you sell enough. And it can go to really low 3%. The problem being Gumroad is not customisible as Paddle is.
I don't think there are better options. Thats why everybody in software is starting to use Paddle.
The problem is that Paddle keeps spamming me despite my repeated insistence that they leave me alone, so I don't trust anyone who says anything about Paddle and just assume they are paid to post about Paddle.
Also, Paddle's licensing solution really locks you into their system, and they have in the past had an issue where all users needed to re-activate their license after an OS upgrade, and developers suddenly had to provide support for an issue they paid Paddle to solve.
The pricing doesn't really matter. Whether it's 5% or 6% I don't care. What I care about is that they don't lock me in, send me proper invoices, respond in a timely manner to support requests, and include enough details on the invoice so the customer knows who to bother with billing questions (not me).
Fastspring fails on this, since they only put my email address on their invoices, so customers email me with all kinds of billing questions that I can't fix. Then I have to tell them to go to Fastsprings stupid support portal, and it's annoying for everyone involved.
With MyCommerce I've never had a customer contact me with billing questions, they make it much clearer that they are selling the license, not me. And they put their email address on the invoice. The only problem with MyCommerce that I've had so far is that their checkout form is a bit buggy on Safari, which is a bummer, and they say that it's Safaris fault for not sticking to web standards, which is a dumb excuse.
Today I just got hired to work on an open source company.
I could not be happier, I may not be rich but I can work at something I love in public, with great team mates, and in an async-remote first company with little to no office politics or mandatory all hands meetings.
It would be 100x times harder for me to get paid via small sponsorships like this.
There's hundreds of YC companies building open source, look for them, apply to the ones you like. Enjoy.
If you're looking at this want to get paid to work in public – I'd love to hire some TypeScript contractors to work on https://github.com/outline/outline – hmu!
Hey! I actually looked into contributing into outline (awesome notion FOSS alternative btw) when I had this crazy idea for a DAO/Web3 about research publishing platform (outline + latex support would have been great for that, there was an open branch and looked into it).
Kudos on the great product and project, I am sure it's a great company to work at!
Yup those two are the best ROI for me too. Had to politeley turn down 3 other offers/contacts from last month at workatastartup (didnt pursue them tbh, I hate interviews)
And HN who's hiring has gotten me several contracts/gigs in the past so can vouch for its usefulness too
This is brilliant and congratulations. You're showing exactly how to users can fund open source projects, and also how developers can create better reach. Kudos.
Yeah I'm surprised this post doesn't have more upvotes. A rare positive story in the open source world, where the author is able to generate enough revenue to compensate for quitting their full-time job and work on their open source project full-time! Plus he has fully laid out the template for how he did it and other open-source maintainers can do it too. This isn't one of those "get rich quick" stories / ads you see on Youtube, it's actually a fully self-sustaining model for open source that the author has lived out.
No longer able to edit my original comment but just wanted to note that I'm glad to see this post has picked up more traction (and has a lot more upvotes) compared to when I made my comment.
Working on opensource is fun if you're paid to work for it!
What's not fun is being an unpaid open source maintainer that has to deal with toxic "open issues" by ungrateful people on the web.
I wish github would have a system where you need to donate $1 to open an issue and it's down to the maintainers to decide whether it's a good issue or claim the $1 if the issue opened is kinda toxic.
What's fun with open source is that even if you're paid or unpaid, you owe people absolutely nothing and you can close whatever issue you want, for whatever reason you want. Tired of dealing with toxic issues? Turn off issues and let people fix their own shit.
No one is forcing you to accept issues, toxic or not, same goes for patches. In open source, you create your own project and you run it however you want.
I've been watching educational screencasts for a while, its an interesting concept. You sprinkle in your own tools into a general tutorial about something else, and the whole crowd uses your tools.
Its also being abused in some areas on youtube right now with people deploying malicious code from the tutorials. The code isn't hosted on github its hosted on IPFS
(I don't want this to come across as overly negative but it might. That's not my intention.)
There are many reasons why quitting your day job and growing a presence that will get you sponsorships is worthwhile, and I am a strong advocate for paying open source devs who maintain the packages you use. However, if you're thinking of trying to copy Caleb's success, remember that it'll take 28 years before he'll have earned more than he would have if he'd kept his $90k/year job.
Arguably a talented dev will never earn more than if they'd had a job instead. Open source is a route to working on something you love, but you will be leaving money on the table to do it unless the landscape changes a lot.
There is still a ton of change necessary in the open source model before it becomes a viable 'job' for most people.
> it'll take 28 years before he'll have earned more than he would have if he'd kept his $90k/year job.
Sorry, I'm having a brain fade here. Are you talking about the time required to make up for lost earnings (and ignoring that the current 112k is not a fixed amount the way a salary generally is)?
I think there's a small error in the calculation. The article is from 2020. So looks like he hit 100k about 1 year after leaving his full time job. Using his current sponsor count of 832 and the minimum sponsorship level of $14 he's making $138k/year.
With all that said. There is definitely some survivor bias here. He found a great niche and a appears to already have had an audience which helps tremendously compared to starting from scratch. Not everyone will have the same success experience.
Hoping I can get a similar thing going in the near future.
"leaving money on the table" is not the same as "becoming a viable job". For many, enough money is enough, and the culture of the workplace, who you work with, what product you're building and more, is more important than the amount of money you earn. At a certain point, you earn enough money monthly to be happy and increasing that some percent but having to work a lot harder (or worse: working on things you don't really care about) is a shitty tradeoff.
If you work on Web3 projects you can easily make a living in the open source model. I did it for a year; there is a large amount of work and funding available on Github through gitcoin.co. and other organizations. If you have the skills you can pick and choose projects at will and get paid handsomely for it.
More than the amount of money, he's trading dealing with all the bullshit rituals of being employed in a company with strangers writing crap on GitHub issues.
Open source is still a better deal, you can just turn issues off and never hear any strangers writing crap in GitHub issues. "Turn off" your ears at a company to avoid crap and you'll be fired quickly.
He cut his salary by $70k for 4 years ($280k 'lost'), and now he's earning $100k which is $10k more than the $90k he was on. It'll take 28 years to make up the lost salary.
I mean, the math is very much simplified. People get raises, and change roles, and there's tax to deal with, and jobs have benefits, etc. The core point is that you'll probably earn a lot more in a job. If you can find one where you're paid to maintain a library you like that's probably better for you financially than trying to get sponsors.
$100K may not sound like much next to todays SWE salaries, but this is a major accomplishment. Congrats / good for him. I doubt there are many FOSS developers who have monetized their work to that extent.
This is very awesome! Well done! Seeing how these sponsors can have success like this is inspiring; just wish we weren't blocked (by Stripe) from going this route :(
To add to the sibling comment and to make a shameless plug to my own project: if you want to accept payments with crypto, take a look at Hub20 [0], a self-hosted payment gateway for any blockchain compatible with Ethereum.
I'm working on the upcoming release (hopefully by the end of this month) which will make it a lot easier to add stripe-like checkout systems, so you can have a donation page or even "sell" sponsorship packages.
And yes, to get it on github [1] sponsors was a royal pain. Github/Stripe kept denying my application because they thought I was asking for crypto payments.
Why not crypto? Seems pretty good for a problem like yours.
Why not other stripe-like providers which financial backing/integrations aren't run by american prudish double standard will deal with the cartel but not with a legal pot seller banks.
You've mollie which is very stripe-like and from the netherlands, sure there's more possibility they allow you than others.
Stripe is bringing crypto a la coinbase soon, could you use that with them?
The Stripe part is baked into the GitHub Sponsors. So while we qualify for one, we are blocked because of the dependency on Stripe.
My industry does not have wide support for crypto payments (which is a surprise); it's still difficult to turn it back into USD (eg: crypto.com, coinbase.com don't allow it).
We do accept some crypto payments but it mostly stays in the crypto space; until get to pay someone else that takes it. It's a PITA for taxes however.
In USA our payments are handled by typical banks/providers (except the one mentioned here). It's not like we're totally blocked.
Again, not diminishing the accomplishment at all...very impressive.