Interesting take. For every star we had on GitHub we did 21 cents in monthly revenue for (around $1300). We needed to turn Fathom into a viable competitor to Google Analytics. We can't do that if we are working a few hours a week on it, we needed to be full time.

Here's a comparison I've always looked at. Here are 2 solid database tools:

Table Plus - https://tableplus.com/ SQLite Browser - https://sqlitebrowser.org/

Table Plus is about 3 years old, SQLite is 6 years old. I have used both but Table Plus is 10000x better and more popular. Everyone talks about it and they innovate fast. They work full time on it too, $59 a license. They are so active, and have so many great features. Full time salaries help with that. SQLite has $102 in Patreon support. Table Plus makes that in 2 sales.

Look at Sequel Pro. One of the best products in the game but it never built a sustainable business model and it wasn't economically viable to continue, and look at it now.

I'm happy to say that we're achieving our goal every day. Our goal is to build a sustainable, profitable business (profitable businesses don't typically close down) that we can we can work full time on every day, moving people away from Google Analytics. For every 1 negative comment we get, hundreds / thousands of people signing up for Fathom.

We've spoken about it here too: https://usefathom.com/podcast/opensource