Are you in the US?
It seems like it may be possible to live on the bug bounty rewards in places with cheaper cost of living, but you would need to get, like, 10 $5,000 bounties a year to survive in the US wouldn't you?
It seems like it may be possible to live on the bug bounty rewards in places with cheaper cost of living, but you would need to get, like, 10 $5,000 bounties a year to survive in the US wouldn't you?
More like 2 $5k bounties a year for me. Where I live in the U.S., I could rent a house for $500/mo ($6,000 a year), and I eat about $200 of food per month ($2,400 a year). So the cost of living per year is $8,400.
But yes, it entirely depends on where you live. For me, I specifically chose this place so that I could live comfortably on bug bounty income
Assuming you don't need to pay for electricity, water, trash service, internet, phone service, medicine, toilet paper, detergent, need to leave your house ever, buy a computer to actually work with.
The main aim of the game is to have extensive infrastructure and code to do asset identification & delta. When Facebook puts a new host live without ACLs, you’ve gotta wake at 3am and hit it.
On the plus side, the bug hunter would have the advantages of being their own boss. On negative side, their finance and tax situation might be worse or at least more complicated. Probably also better to save money in case they have a stretch where bug finds or payouts drop. Someone doing that would need even lower cost of living.