Any programmers making a living off of GitHub Sponsors and/or Patreon?

Question

Are you or do you know of anyone who is doing this? Is it possible?

stevekemp · Accepted Answer

I know a lot of people who have projects with 500-5000 stars and zero sponsors.
Realistically the prospect of living off open-source development on github is as likely as living on sales as a book author. It happens, but it doesn't happen easily or often.
If you run a super-popular project you might pickup a sponsor or two, but it seems that the odds are low.

lasagnaphil · Answer

Omar Cornut, who's a full time developer of dear imgui (https://github.com/ocornut/imgui), an immediate-mode UI library primarily used to create content-creation and debug/visualization tools.He was using Patreon until the end of 2019, but has actually removed it since he already got so much corporate sponsors over the years (His platinum sponsors right now are Blizzard, Google, Nvidia, and Ubisoft... enough said.) And he wholeheartedly deserves all the money, since his UI library is just so monumentally important for anyone doing 3D graphics or gamedev.

bunya017 · Answer

Evan You(the creator of Vue Js) does, he pulls in $150k+.https://www.patreon.com/evanyou

makison · Answer

Yeah, haven't followed him in a while, but listened to his podcasts quite a lot few years ago. Really cool guy.https://calebporzio.com/i-just-hit-dollar-100000yr-on-github...

Otek · Answer

Sindre is an example. But I agree with @asddubs. It's pretty rare. https://github.com/sindresorhus

cheeseblubber · Answer

I know a lot of open source project maintainers. Most of the sponsorships are negligible.
The ones that have a bit more sponsorships tend to offer some sort of priority support. But even that is very difficult.
I also maintain an open source project with 4k stars but we didn’t even bother with the sponsorship path and decided to monetize by charging for a hosted version.
For reference https://github.com/papercups-io/papercups

asddubs · Answer

https://www.patreon.com/marcanmarcan is pretty close to full time for his asahi linux project. but he's also had a high profile (at least comparatively speaking) for ages now. it's pretty rare from what I can tell

kdtsh · Answer

Patrick Volkerding, BDFL of Slackware, must be fairly close (or at least I hope he is). He started a Patreon late last year which has built up to a steady monthly stream of cash.

bwh2 · Answer

The book Working In Public is a good resource for learning more about how open source developers fund their work through sponsors, consulting, etc.

cpach · Answer

I&rsquo;m certain it&rsquo;s possible. But not an easy goal to reach.

Any programmers making a living off of GitHub Sponsors and/or Patreon?

Are you or do you know of anyone who is doing this? Is it possible?

Evan You(the creator of Vue Js) does, he pulls in $150k+.
https://www.patreon.com/evanyou

Yeah, haven't followed him in a while, but listened to his podcasts quite a lot few years ago. Really cool guy.
https://calebporzio.com/i-just-hit-dollar-100000yr-on-github...

Sindre is an example. But I agree with @asddubs. It's pretty rare. https://github.com/sindresorhus

https://www.patreon.com/marcan
marcan is pretty close to full time for his asahi linux project. but he's also had a high profile (at least comparatively speaking) for ages now. it's pretty rare from what I can tell

Patrick Volkerding, BDFL of Slackware, must be fairly close (or at least I hope he is). He started a Patreon late last year which has built up to a steady monthly stream of cash.

The book Working In Public is a good resource for learning more about how open source developers fund their work through sponsors, consulting, etc.

I’m certain it’s possible. But not an easy goal to reach.