Jun 2020
I have a story to tell.
My last year as a full-time developer (at Tighten) was 2018. (Read “On Leaving My Day Job” for that story)
My income for that year was ~$90k:
Developer salaries vary like crazy, but $90k was pretty solid for me. Combined with my wife’s income and some Mustachianism it was plenty to save up a chunk of cash for a rainy day. (Or for a few months of working un-paid on open source lol – SPOILER ALERT 😬)
After needing a change of scenery, I left Tighten on January 11th, 2019 to go on a “sabbatical” (fancy word for “take a break and do whatever the hell I want“ 😛) and then start freelancing or something after a couple of months.
4 days into my Sabbatical, I read this post and hastily made a proof of concept for Laravel.
This day marked the abrupt end of my sabbatical. I was completely enamored with the project (now called Livewire) and couldn’t stop working on it full-time. (I’ve never stopped. I’m STILL enamored with it full-time.)
(I also created a pretty popular JS framework along the way called AlpineJS that I work on too, but that’s a story for another time…)
Believe it or not, open-source software doesn’t quite pay the bills, so I took on some small code mentorship clients to stay above the water for the entire year of 2019.
Here was my income for 2019 from that freelance work:
I reduced my salary by ~$70k so I could pursue my passion. It seemed risky, but I knew it would only get harder to make this kind of move in life.
Lots of kind folks reached out to me along the way asking how they could help support the project. Sending me messages like this:
I avoided creating a Patreon for a long time because I kept picturing a world where a handful of people give me five bucks a month. Which would be nice, but never seemed worth it to me.
Then I saw GitHub Sponsors. 😍
It seemed perfect. Hosted directly on GitHub and new enough that there’s some excitement around it.
I was accepted into GitHub Sponsors on Dec. 12th of 2019.
(Thanks for being my first sponsor, Brian! ❤️)
I’ve since received ~$25k in cash from GitHub sponsors…
(They match the first $5k, and they take a ZERO percent cut. You keep EVERYTHING 🙌🏻❤️)
…and as of this writing, I’ve grown my annual GitHub sponsors revenue to $112,680/yr. 🎉
Wow.
I am now making more money than I’ve ever made while developing open-source software for a community that I adore. Pinch me, I’m dreaming.
Was it luck? there’s certainly been a lot of that.
Was it fate? Let’s leave religion out of this mmkay?…
Was it that the software I built was so incredibly compelling that it forced 535 people to give me at least $14/mo. to keep working on it? …I wish.
It’s more than that though. There were some key things I did along the way to get here. Let me tell you all about them.
Here we go!
Phase 1: Good-Hearted Folks
At first, GitHub Sponsors was a place to send loyal/generous followers that wanted to support the project.
However saintly these people are, there aren’t that many of them compared to the number of people actually using the software (and often making money on it).
Because of the nature of open-source, people are already getting the software for free, so without ADDING any value to their lives, this strategy is seriously limiting.
The first section of this income graph is solely from kind folks who just wanted to pitch in.
Huge thank you to all those people.
Now let’s talk about that first spike.
Phase 2: Sponsorware
Here’s where things started to get wild.
I had a cool idea for a small little Laravel package.
While recording an episode of No Plans To Merge with my buddy Daniel on how to monetize it, we cooked up a novel idea called: “Sponsorware”
Here’s how Sponsorware works:
- Create a cool piece of software
- Make it exclusive to people who sponso
