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Ask HN: How are you monetizing your OSS project?

by yuvalkarmi on 7/26/23, 12:31 PM with 4 comments

Hey folks, question -- my buddy and I are working on a new OSS project that's been taking off recently and we're starting to gain some traction.

It's taking up A LOT of our time.

This is cool enough where we're actually considering quitting our day jobs to maintain it, but we still need to somehow feed ourselves...

I'm curious if there are other OSS maintainers here who have done it before and can give us their two cents (no pun intended) on monetization?

Do we ask for donations? patreon? just stick to sponsorships? Or is there another way we're missing (short of opening a company around it, which we'd rather not do for reasons out of the scope of this post).

Any help appreciated!

by joergrech on 7/26/23, 1:10 PM
Hi, I've collected many monetization approaches in the "Awesome OSS Monetization" list on Github - maybe it helps you to find alternatives to donations / sponsorships:
https://github.com/PayDevs/awesome-oss-monetization
by lnalx on 7/26/23, 5:01 PM
Hi,
I've created Claper [0], an open-source tool for real-time interaction with a public. You have multiple ways to monetize an OSS, starting from donation, sponsorship to consulting or SaaS.
Personally, I chose the last one with a cloud version. I like this model, people paying for the SaaS support the project and have, in return, a hosted version of the OSS, and so contribute to improve it.
[0] https://claper.co/
by pabs3 on 7/26/23, 1:23 PM
Some resources for grants and patronage:
https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources#grants https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources#patronag...
by tacostakohashi on 7/26/23, 12:58 PM
How about offering training, consulting, courses / books, etc?