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Comment by NickBusey | Hacker News Reader

I hit $500/yr on Patreon this week for my open source work! :)

Nice work, I should think about having paid only videos as well, I believe I can do that pretty easily on Patreon. Good tips in here.

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Lol I didn't notice there wasn't a 'k' in there and was really impressed for a moment.

I'm still impressed. It makes me happy to see that people are getting a bit of money for the value they bring us.

Anybody have opinions/reasoning on Patreon vs Github Sponsors when it comes to open source work?

The biggest difference would be that GitHub Sponsors has no fees [1], so everything people put in will go to the developer. Where Patreon can take 5-12% depending on the plan [2].

Additionally, GitHub is just so much closer to the actual open source work and more easily discoverable for users of your product.

As a supporter, I'll pick GitHub over Patreon anytime.

[1] https://help.github.com/en/github/supporting-the-open-source... [2] https://www.patreon.com/product/pricing

That's what I was surprised the most about. 0% cut and they also mentioned a 5k match? What? How is that even viable for Microsoft?

That seems superior to basically every single platform out there. It's an instant win for GitHub Sponsors.

It's a promotional incentive. Fees will happen, and matching will end. But in the meantime, it means my sponsoring a project I care about magnifies my money for a cause I value, so I'm happy to participate.

Paying 5k to high profile people is probably just a fraction of what they spend on marketing, but probably more effective.

Say you are a marketer and you bring hundreds of paying users to a platform, 5k is cheap.

Microsoft has such deep pockets, they can probably afford to lose a bit here to get people to migrate to their platform.

Yeah the $5k match seems easy to game

I for myself, coming from a privileged situation wonder if 500$/yr would be worth it for me.

Do calling it "work" it is too little. Won't pay the time spent on a job.

At the same time it is an amount of money, causing responsibility. Giving the feeling that one has to return something for it ...

So how does at affect your fun-level?

I don't have the feeling that I have to give something in return. It's a voluntary donation, people can donate, or not. They can cancel at any time. I don't feel any pressure to 'deliver' anything. They're paying because they want to reward the value I have provided, and likely will continue to provide. If I stop providing it, I assume people will slowly cancel their donations, which is how things should work.

If anything the fun-level has gone way up because a community has formed around one of my projects, which has been great.

I have my own little company and I feel like since its profitable (7 figures/year) I'm able to take my time and perfect parts of the project (like SQL indexing, UI/UX, new features). The money allows me to have the freedom to have fun. I've built internal libraries where I could have just used an open source version, but its mine and I enjoy it.

I had started another company before that I spent over a year on and I made $0. Not fun.

Congratulations! That's great! How long have you been doing the open source work and what industry does it serve?

Thanks! Years now, though the project that has gained traction lately is HomelabOS. https://homelabos.com/

Not really serving industry, self-hosters and home-labbers.

That is actually quite cool. If people had to pay for facebook they wouldn't. What do you think is missing for self-hosters, easy sign up ? I don't think it is easy create to DNS and private server for normal folks.

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