Gittip, Year Two

I've been writing opensource software full-time for the past few months. A few weeks ago, I checked my Gittip profile out of curiosity. I found out someone was anonymously giving me $0.5/wk, for the last 4 weeks. I had $2 as my balance. I was in tears when I saw that. I felt that mattered. Someone cared about my work.

I'm excited that in a few weeks it can pay for the domain name for my next opensource project.

Thanks to Chad, the Gittip team and the community. I hope Gittip works out well for them financially to sustain themselves and do more.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#5

Post by gw » Wed, Jun 04, 2014, 7:21 AM UTC

I've been using Gittip for my free software projects, and while I am nowhere near being sustainable, it's more than I expected to get. There is certainly room for two players (see Kickstarter/Indiegogo), and I much prefer Gittip's minimalism and lack of flare.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#6

Post by ronilan » Wed, Jun 04, 2014, 7:27 AM UTC

jimmytidey wrote: post #2

It's an incredibly admirable thing to be doing.

It is. But it is also the wrong thing to be doing.

"Gittip’s mission is to enable an economy of gratitude, generosity, and love". In order to affect such a thing one needs leverage. That is, one needs a lever and a place to stand on. If two years in and after several times at the top of HN, Chad still can't make a living - then he has neither. The mission will fail. It is better to let go.

Just my own meandering experience.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#7

Post by KJasper » Wed, Jun 04, 2014, 7:35 AM UTC

I've never heard of Gittip nor Patreon before reading this article. Looking at both websites the website for Patreon is much more engaging and less cluttered. Gittip looks intimidating with all those small pictures and numbers going around. A good redesign for the index would propel the business more than all those commits. Love both ideas though :)

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#8

Post by jve » Wed, Jun 04, 2014, 7:37 AM UTC

Took me some looking around to find a link on bottom of the (gittip.com) page to actually find out what gittip does.

First thought was - is it a way to get paid by submitting patches through GitHub? No, actually thats a site where you give/receive donations to people on Twitter/GitHub/Bitbucket

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#9

Post by huehue » Wed, Jun 04, 2014, 7:40 AM UTC

Funny thing is most top earners don't even seem to code.

Re: Gittip, Year Two

#10

Post by chroma » Wed, Jun 04, 2014, 7:45 AM UTC

Let me preface this by saying: I want Gittip to succeed. I really want them to succeed. I would love to be able to spend my time getting paid by a community to develop open source software. However... those growth curves look linear, if not sigmoid. More importantly:

>The Gittip team receives $20,339 per year (averaging the past ten weeks). There are 39 people splitting that money.

$500 per person per year? That's not within two orders of magnitude of sustainability.[1] In addition, even the greatest collector of revenue on Gittip can't make a decent living from it. $40k per year is quite close to minimum wage in California.

I truly wish it were otherwise, but this post makes me seriously worry about the future of Gittip. Apparently, they did not make something people want.

1. I realize that only a few people are full-time on Gittip, but that's still a huge red flag. Unless the author is being extremely generous with his profit sharing, those numbers are inexcusable.