141–150 of 185 posts
I'd love to see more people donating to charity. With my software, it's MIT open source, but pre-packaged it's pay what you want ($3.50 minimum) and $3.50 of every purchase goes to my favorite charity: Against Malaria Foundation. https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
> when you give away something completely for free, people aren’t that motivated to pay for it. I created gitingore.io about 8 years ago and it's almost at 5000 stars. I had nearly 100k MAU's and that was still not enough to survive. My customers included developers form top tech startups and major companies in the world but the product was free. I ended up selling it so I can re-focus on something more valuable.
I'm closing in on 100 public, nontrivial, nonforked repos on github. Since github's inception, I've received a total of $200 in donations for my OSS stuff, 1 job from a company that uses a product of mine as the foundation of their business, and many job offers from people who are familiar with my work. I don't make money off OSS, and never have (at least not directly). But I just. can't. stop. I can't. I've tried su…
But yeah, I get that.
I'm closing in on 100 public, nontrivial, nonforked repos on github. Since github's inception, I've received a total of $200 in donations for my OSS stuff, 1 job from a company that uses a product of mine as the foundation of their business, and many job offers from people who are familiar with my work. I don't make money off OSS, and never have (at least not directly). But I just. can't. stop. I can't. I've tried su…
Even better would be to work part time for sufficient money (if possible) and have more time for personal projects, no?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you tried charging for commercial licenses? They can be the exact same as whatever you license it as now, but with a price tag. Relatively speaking it’s very hard for a company to donate money, but very easy to buy things. I know you said it’s not about the money, but if you -do- want to make more from it, maybe give it a try.
I've heard this idea so many times but I've never heard from anybody who actually made money like this.
I'd love to see more people donating to charity. With my software, it's MIT open source, but pre-packaged it's pay what you want ($3.50 minimum) and $3.50 of every purchase goes to my favorite charity: Against Malaria Foundation. https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
I'm curious of the effectiveness of this model. Do you have any metrics on how many users have paid?
I've been documenting the donations as well on the blog: https://videohubapp.com/blog.html
When you're the only user of your app it's fun, you can deploy easily, maybe prod is also your staging env ... You can afford to screw up your database etc. If you have users you now have to be careful, if your deployment fails the downtime becomes a mental burden, you have to manage backups etc.
Maintaining an open source project is also a lot of work. Issues piling on, Pull requests to review, which are not that more fun at home than at work. If you ignore them you start to feel guilty. If you lose interest or have no need for the project anymore you'll feel guilty as well.
Anecdotal evidence, my father have made an open ESP*-based webradio. Somehow it got popular (especially in Eastern Europe for some reason). It's fun, people sending you photos of their finished projects etc but then requests for features you don't care for start piling on, you have more bug to fix.
He has a donation button and he could monetize more but he's retired and doesn't really care about money, he just wants to have fun making something and the success is a double-edged sword in that regard.