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Comment by shawn | Hacker News Reader

Nah, open source just isn't lucrative.

https://www.patreon.com/sindresorhus

Most JS devs know sindresorhus by reputation. You can't help but knowing him through his work. He even put up a separate twitter solely because people kept wanting a way to see whenever he made a new github repo.

Patreon makes him $3300/mo. So that appears to be the ceiling for all of us.

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I think the open source model that has been shown to work is to make a great code product for free and then add a few more awesome features for a “pro” version with support attached. That’s how Sidekiq works and he’s making good money: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/how-charging-money-fo...

> Patreon makes him $3300/mo. So that appears to be the ceiling for all of us.

Hopefully it becomes an average, not a ceiling. We're not all going to make the next Vue, but that guy is getting $16k/mo https://www.patreon.com/evanyou .. that's what I consider the ceiling.

That person appears to be getting paid a significant amount of that for advertising, _not_ for contributing to an open source project.

the advertising subset of that patreon exists because of the popularity of the open source project he develops full-time.

> Nah, open source just isn't lucrative.

And closed source isn't either when it comes to productivity tools (because there are so many free alternatives).

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