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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

Have you thought about advertising $$$$$ for features?

I suspect that's not something you have time for (nor do I) but I just brought it up because I have a friend that runs a semi-successful open source project and has managed to find companies willing to pay for support and new features to the point that he's fulltime on his project and has told me he was planning to hire one more person (I didn't follow up to see if he hired someone)

On the converse, I hate the new culture of put up an open source project and ask for money, especially when that project is often very small and/or really just an assembly of 2-4 other open source projects.

This seems especially common in npm/node projects now-a-days. Every repo I look at has a donate button for even the smallest of things.

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Has your friend blogged about this approach? I'd be super interested to hear more!

I'm one of those annoying people with a donate button. Despite my project's size (~10.5k stars on Github), it pulls down only about $60/month. While awesome, and I'm legit thankful for the people who back open source, it's obviously not yet at an amount where I could devote my time to open source entirely or even part time (which would be the dream!).

My recent minor release took about 45 hours to prepare, then another 8 for a quick followup tacking on some additional functionality. Which is to say, open source gets me about $1/hr ^_^

Hey thanks for the input. I haven't tried that approach yet, but I'll consider it for future endeavours.

So far I'm quite happy with the SaaS approach as I'm able to prioritize my effort on improving the product for customers who support it via paid plans.

As a one-man team it's important to reduce operational efforts. I like very much the idea of having monthly subscriptions with predictable cash flows. Let's see how it goes.

> So far I'm quite happy with the SaaS approach as I'm able to prioritize my effort on improving the product for customers who support it via paid plans.

Note: the two approaches aren't mutually exclusive. You may even find that the folks who prefer to self-host the open-source version are leads to even more lucrative on-prem enterprise plans.

The hard part to think about is segmentation of features between the open-source/free tier and the paid plan/enterprise versions.

Of course, this is all becomes dramatically easier if you decide there is no difference feature-wise, and the differentiation is solely in volume of use and level of support.

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