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Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

thanks.dev

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Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#161

Post by armini »

esclear wrote: post #150

One thing that I haven't seen addressed here or in the FAQ is: What happens to donations towards dependencies where the maintainer / organization / group of maintainers is not registered at thanks.dev? The FAQ has a section titled "What happens if I don’t claim my balance?", but I think this only applies to people registered at thanks.dev. I'm not even sure that thanks.dev would be able to reliably contact developers…

great observation & questions, we will update that on our FAQ shortly. If users aren't registered then we can't verify who's project admin & no funds will be allocated to them from the sponsors pool. Only when an admin register then we can allocate funds.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#162

Post by toastal »

paulddraper wrote: post #30

Plot twist: This was the endgame of all those 1000s of trivial npm packages.

Why Array.isArray() when you can require("isarray").isArray()? (Node.js 0.10.0, Fx 4.0)

deep-equal has 43 packages (& 17m weekly downloads) that are mostly (is|has)-* packages or redundant wrappers like for-each and object-keys (https://npmgraph.js.org/?q=deep-equal) and you’ll find this package included in a lot of upstream libraries. Ask for a banana and get a gorilla and forest... Luckily many have moved to fast-deep-equal (0 dependencies), but there are a lot of other examples of this sort of thing.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#163

Post by nicbou »

xeonmc wrote: post #126
nicbou wrote: post #87

Donation income is risibly small. People will sign praise your work, tell you how much they depend on it, and how it changed their lives. Others will ask you tricky questions that really ought to be asked to a lawyer. ...and they still won't donate a cent. I get about 70 cents per thousand unique visitors. About one in every 14,000 visitors donate. Affiliate income is roughly 100 times that without trying. Let me put…

I think the main obstacle to donations, even for those who _would_ wish to donate, is the fact that it requires a premeditated process (e.g. going to the project homepage to donate) or that it makes the request _before_ the user had a chance to realize how useful it is, rather than after. If instead there is some way to capitalize the timing of the user experiencing "wow this makes my life so much easier!" to remind…

My tip jar is in my email signature, which means it's part of the answer people get when they request free support from me. It's also at the end of the content they consume from my website.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#164

Post by nicbou »

rcfox wrote: post #142
nicbou wrote: post #87

Donation income is risibly small. People will sign praise your work, tell you how much they depend on it, and how it changed their lives. Others will ask you tricky questions that really ought to be asked to a lawyer. ...and they still won't donate a cent. I get about 70 cents per thousand unique visitors. About one in every 14,000 visitors donate. Affiliate income is roughly 100 times that without trying. Let me put…

What do you mean when you refer to "affiliate income"? Is that like ads, or putting your ID in Amazon links, or something like that?

I use affiliate links for the products I mention in my guides. There is no promotion beyond "if you need this service I just talked about, these options exist in your language".

If I actually pitched products, I'd make even more.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#165

Post by nicbou »

agrimonyhal wrote: post #90
nicbou wrote: post #87

Donation income is risibly small. People will sign praise your work, tell you how much they depend on it, and how it changed their lives. Others will ask you tricky questions that really ought to be asked to a lawyer. ...and they still won't donate a cent. I get about 70 cents per thousand unique visitors. About one in every 14,000 visitors donate. Affiliate income is roughly 100 times that without trying. Let me put…

If many open projects are funded via ads, will Copilot tools crater open source revenues by reducing traffic to documentation?

Most projects aren't funded at all.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#166

Post by armini »

sli wrote: post #131
Sephr wrote: post #23

The UI imposes a 5% minimum (and 15% default) value for "Tip thanks.dev" under "How much would you like to donate each month?" on https://thanks.dev/settings This implementation is clearly for-profit. I want to directly tip open source projects using a system that doesn't involve other third parties taking a significant cut.

The service also completely blocks VPN users with a 403. That seems like blocking a pretty good chunk of your target audience to me. I will absolutely be looking elsewhere to support projects I benefit from.

We don’t intentionally block anyone but we’re looking to see what could be the problem. Thanks for letting us know.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#167

Post by nicbou »

p0nce wrote: post #143
nicbou wrote: post #87

Donation income is risibly small. People will sign praise your work, tell you how much they depend on it, and how it changed their lives. Others will ask you tricky questions that really ought to be asked to a lawyer. ...and they still won't donate a cent. I get about 70 cents per thousand unique visitors. About one in every 14,000 visitors donate. Affiliate income is roughly 100 times that without trying. Let me put…

I think that's all there is to it really. People just don't want to donate.

That's it. I don't donate so often myself.

Tipping in the real world is easy. You just leave some of the money you have on you. Tipping online is a far more deliberate process, unless you're already processing payments.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#168

Post by nicbou »

popey wrote: post #102
nicbou wrote: post #87

Donation income is risibly small. People will sign praise your work, tell you how much they depend on it, and how it changed their lives. Others will ask you tricky questions that really ought to be asked to a lawyer. ...and they still won't donate a cent. I get about 70 cents per thousand unique visitors. About one in every 14,000 visitors donate. Affiliate income is roughly 100 times that without trying. Let me put…

Depends how you present it. The Ubuntu download page used to punch you in the face asking for donations. They also tried sliders, asking downloaders to choose how to spend the money they donated. These were super successful. People felt in control of how their money was spent. There was no way for them to check in on that, it was a trust process. But the net result was a lot of people donated a very significant amoun…

There's the thing though. The numbers above are for making money without annoying or guilt-tripping my readers.

If I didn't care about user experience, I could earn more from donations, but I could also earn much more from affiliate links.

As it is, I just list a few options when I happen to mention a products. There is a tip jar at the end of every guide, and in my email signature.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#169

Post by armini »

gehen88 wrote: post #133

Is nobody concerned with the fact this tool scans your repository contents? This tool is mostly intended for use with private projects, not open source, so I would expect a LOT more scrutiny (and options) around security.

We are working to open source our project & we also have an api integration solution for those who prefer to only share their package files.

Re: Sponsor the open source projects you depend on

#170

Post by armini »

luckylion wrote: post #124

"Donation" is a somewhat tainted word, because it often has certain legal issues attached. Most maintainers aren't non-profits, so they don't take donations, they get income (and it'll get taxed). At the same time, "donating" something without it actually being a donation is complicated for businesses (e.g. github not invoicing me for sponsorships gets my tax consultants to make sad faces). I understand the idea, but…

I personally like to see companies sponsoring maintainers. We’re working to clarify that with the community is the terms have different value propositions & financial implications.
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