11–20 of 82 posts
I met Chad when I lived in Pittsburgh and we had great times regularly hacking on Gratipay in a coffee shop. Chad would teach regulars how to code by making them do small pull requests on the project. Even when Patreon swooped up the market he had a profound sense of why the project still mattered -- Gratipay was open source, took no fees, and was funded entirely on its own platform. Chad you are a badass, cheers man…
Liberapay seems pretty good, a lot like older gittip in UX. Leaderboards and all. I'd be interested in hearing more about it, why it split from gittip, etc. I may use it instead of patreon, but there's not a lot of information about, well, how it was founded. I suspect I will be switching my matrix donation from patreon to liberapay. It would have been nice to know that was an option.
Liberapay is a solid fork, and there doesn't seem to be any personal issue between Chad and Changaco. We've even implemented a direct migration tool for Gratipay users to move to Liberapay.
Having helped out very little with this project - it makes me sad to see it go. Chad is a great guy and means well in all that he does. I wish him the best :)
Patreon has cornered the market on funding projects which otherwise have not much revenue potential. I’ve been seeing more and more open source projects switching to that model. (The only bad thing about Patreon is no option for one-time contributions)
And every time I hung out with Chad it was like this, people from all over the world, in all sorts of backgrounds and difficulties made it a point to be Chad’s friend.
Chad, you may think you didn’t get to change the world with Gratipay, but you did, you are the catalyst that will change the world for the better. Thank you.
Liberapay seems pretty good, a lot like older gittip in UX. Leaderboards and all. I'd be interested in hearing more about it, why it split from gittip, etc. I may use it instead of patreon, but there's not a lot of information about, well, how it was founded. I suspect I will be switching my matrix donation from patreon to liberapay. It would have been nice to know that was an option.
Here's why Changaco left Gratipay and a bit on starting Liberapay: https://changaco.oy.lc/blog/goodbye-gratipay . Liberapay is a solid fork, and there doesn't seem to be any personal issue between Chad and Changaco. We've even implemented a direct migration tool for Gratipay users to move to Liberapay.
I used Gittip for a while, and it was a really nice platform, and netted me $5-15/month if I recall correctly. I left after some regulatory issues added an annoying amount of mental gymnastics to actually get money out of it. Later I built my own self-hosted platform for getting tips [1][2]. This tends to net me $20/month consistently, with occasional bursts due to one-time donations. Also, I know of at least one other installation in the wild, it's being used to support some Mastodon instances.
A few months ago, I set up a Patreon [3] where I earn almost $200/month. This is by far the most successful approach I've seen yet, though it rustles my jimmies a bit to be beholden to a proprietary, centralized service. In the end I'm still not making enough to work on open source full time. Thankfully I make enough today to break even on open source (that is, my infrastructural costs are paid for). Hopefully I can figure something out for full time eventually. It's hard.
Many thanks to the folks at Gratipay. It was an uphill battle for sure but they fought the good fight.
[1] https://drewdevault.com/donate
Startups are ridiculously hard. The biggest mistake young founders and companies make is going heads down in code for 3, 6, 12 months without marketing and sales. I've been there and failed. What is the market? Is it a good one? Open source while incredible, is damn difficult to build a proper business. I'll reiterate my stance that the best products with the best technology often times don't win. That doesn't mean t…
There are a number of reasons for which Gittip/Gratipay may have failed, but "Focusing too much on the tech" doesn't seem to be one of them.
Startups are ridiculously hard. The biggest mistake young founders and companies make is going heads down in code for 3, 6, 12 months without marketing and sales. I've been there and failed. What is the market? Is it a good one? Open source while incredible, is damn difficult to build a proper business. I'll reiterate my stance that the best products with the best technology often times don't win. That doesn't mean t…
This comment seems almost entirely inapplicable to the article. Where did you get the sense that the founder[s] spent too much time working on the technology? There are a number of reasons for which Gittip/Gratipay may have failed, but "Focusing too much on the tech" doesn't seem to be one of them.
> At Gratipay we’ve spent the past year gearing up to relaunch with a renewed focus on open source. However, funding open source is almost entirely about marketing, and we spent most of the past year writing code instead. File this one under, “open source needs all the skill sets,” but also, “startups need all the skill sets.”