I Just Hit $100k/Yr on GitHub Sponsors (2020)
calebporzio.com
calebporzio.com
Again, not diminishing the accomplishment at all...very impressive.
Edit:
Just noticed that it's a post from 2020, he now has 823 sponsors vs 535 then. So assuming the same average sponsorship that takes him to $173k/year.
So really, the difference in take-home pay should be $98,058 vs. $77,842. Or to put in terms of gross revenue ("Total Income", as he puts it), the comparative target number for self-employed people would be $132,371. It doesn't negate his overall point, I just figured I'd mention it.
I mean, my salary contribution to paying the company-sponsored health plan is ~$2K/month, so 14K/year. That's with my employer paying the other ~half of the cost!
Health insurance in the USA is brutal.
- Everything is deductible, your computer, home work space, etc.. They have phased out most deductions for employees.
- Max your 401k if you can (~55k Solo 401k) - this will make up for SE tax AND reduce your AGI so you can be less likely to be income phased out of certain benefits.
- Move to a state income tax free state, if feasible. Saved me $10k/yr.
- Look into short-term health plans. They aren't ACA, but have very desirable terms. For instance, marketplace plan for me 8700 deductible, 16000 out of pocket max was $550. Short term plan $2500 deductible $2500 out of pocket max (just no ACA protections/benefits) was $330 and is ALSO tax deductible, so more like $240. Networks are similar for instance mine is United Healthcare national network.
In a lot of parts (suburbs & such) people will ask anybody new they notice what church you go to. If your answer is anything other than a church you actually go to, word will spread pretty quickly & they’ll genuinely harshly look down upon you. This is overwhelmingly upper middle aged to elderly, but some of their kids follow suit.
It’s a fuckin swamp. Humans were not very made to live in swamps.
Without trying to sound more xenophobic than this already does - the Cubans need a generation or two more away from Castro… some of them are quite openly insane about perceived issues that don’t actually exist in our country.
Pipeline to prison is very real & social safety nets are non existent. It very much pushes people to either kill themselves or become very… unfortunate people to find yourself having to deal with. That said, most humans don’t go the route of killing themselves (a good thing) so you have a lot more of the latter.
Police like to think they’re Wild West cowboys & they get the authority to execute you with no repercussions faster than barbers get licenses to cut hair. Training with their weapons less time than a boy scout took to get a (weapons related) badge.
Sorry for the rant. Florida is one of the rudest awakenings for many who move there with happier ideals in mind. Much worse than a lot of Texas.
How are they trying to dismantle public education, by the way?
Not entirely sure what to say to that. Maybe you’d have a nice life living in a theocracy…
As for your question, google (or search engine of your choice) is your friend.
This is actually a pretty simple one… most textbooks are made in Texas, somewhat controlled by republicans. They’re just banning anything they’re not getting a cut of the profits from & bringing in/giving their friends new textbook contracts.
I'm assuming you are arguing in good faith and have read every page of every math book that is banned to confirm yourself. You surely couldn't be accusing others of not confirming themselves while you do the same thing.
And since you have read everyone of those books you could provide links to the books so we could also confirm ourselves.
>This is actually a pretty simple one… most textbooks are made in Texas, somewhat controlled by republicans.
Just because textbooks are made in Texas doesn't mean Republicans control their content. Do you believe every book written in Texas aligns with the views held by Republicans?
>They’re just banning anything they’re not getting a cut of the profits from & bringing in/giving their friends new textbook contracts.
Do you have any proof of this?
If you want to convince anybody maybe you should provide a source, especially since as you say it won't take much time.
I assume you are just a hypocrite who wanted to accuse the other side of doing the same thing you did and for caught and as such I'm not going to waste my time trying to prove your claim for you.
Why do so many people rave about Singapore and Thailand then? Full disclosure, I despise Singapore and love Florida.
All is not as it may appear.
They’re also trying to genocide trans people.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ErinInTheMorn/status/151677365339...
It's not binary. State has to get its revenue from somewhere, so then you will pay higher property tax and/or sales tax
As the “show me” state, Missouri does not tax the income generated by Twitch hot tub streamers and OnlyFans content creators, but the viewers pay an ogling tax based on tracking eye movements.
The guy from laracasts has lots of open source code on GitHub but it would be weird to say he's making money from open source. He's making money selling a subscription to a video tutorial website.
The author has just swapped out Stripe or another payment gateway for GitHub Sponsors.
I'm not sure how this is any different from Laracasts or any other tutorial site other than the fact that he does make some money directly from the open source, but it's not enough...
> The vast majority of developers don't make any significant money. The outliers that do use the platform as a general-purpose payment processor. They take donations, but they also sell things. The line between isn't terribly clear
People don't like to pay for what is "free". Have you seen any street performance? The artists have to walk to every viewer and look them in the eye to ask for money, they have to keep some money in the hat in specific bills so people around kind of understand how much to pay, they have to keep their own viewers who definitely put money in the hat all the time, so others feel the pressure.
That is the reason why I personally don't want to run any open source projects. I just don't like to ask people. I would never want to ask anybody to contribute, I don't want to find a way to make it profitable. Not saying that it is bad, I just feel so much pressure for asking people to do something. To help, to support, to try to sell something to them.
I am running pretty much 2 companies with close source software. One is very successful, which pay my bills, another one is more like a moonlight project, that makes around $1k to $2k a month (currently contribute most of that to various foundations to support Ukraine). And for the last 5 years I got used to being ok for blame not to write any open source projects. I personally don't use much open source software myself. Not for the reasons I don't want to, just because I am ok to pay for quality. And I don't have time to review some libraries, when I can just write something in a day or two.
I don't sell my software, I publish on Reddit, and other channels about something I do, run promotions, but don't talk to customers to sell anything. All my software is easy to download and try, and purchase without talking to me. But if you are my customers, I would be happy to help you.
The Laracast guy will make videos about anything and the open source soft is mainly sideeffect of him being developer.
Why? If you offer incentives in return for sponsorship (e.g. extra videos) this turns it from a donation to a business transaction. That has tax implications - and you need to know which country the people sponsoring you live in to bill the right tax.
When I last checked GitHub wasn't doing this automatically (https://twitter.com/rafaelcodes/status/1448987494553473024) so it adds a bunch of complexity for you to keep track of.
(I've tried Fastspring too, but I vastly prefer MyCommerce. MyCommerce sends you proper invoices every month that make tax reporting trivial for EU businesses. With Fastspring you have to export lots of CSV files and do lots of work in Excel to get the data you need)
Biggest two players in space Paddle and Gumroad. Both pretty good.
Fastspring is a decent option, but support is really bad, and I had some issues early on where they paid out 5-10% less than they owed me, and said they don't know why and think it's because of exchange rates between USD and EUR.
I can't say anything about Paddle, I think they're a UK company, so after Brexit it's not the best value proposition. I refuse to try them because of their pushy sales people, at one point they were sending me multiple emails a week to try to get me to switch from Fastspring to them, and didn't stop even after I complained.
As for Gumroad, last time I checked they didn't handle VAT, but that's a long time ago so maybe that's changed now?
I don't think there are better options. Thats why everybody in software is starting to use Paddle.
Also, Paddle's licensing solution really locks you into their system, and they have in the past had an issue where all users needed to re-activate their license after an OS upgrade, and developers suddenly had to provide support for an issue they paid Paddle to solve.
The pricing doesn't really matter. Whether it's 5% or 6% I don't care. What I care about is that they don't lock me in, send me proper invoices, respond in a timely manner to support requests, and include enough details on the invoice so the customer knows who to bother with billing questions (not me).
Fastspring fails on this, since they only put my email address on their invoices, so customers email me with all kinds of billing questions that I can't fix. Then I have to tell them to go to Fastsprings stupid support portal, and it's annoying for everyone involved.
With MyCommerce I've never had a customer contact me with billing questions, they make it much clearer that they are selling the license, not me. And they put their email address on the invoice. The only problem with MyCommerce that I've had so far is that their checkout form is a bit buggy on Safari, which is a bummer, and they say that it's Safaris fault for not sticking to web standards, which is a dumb excuse.
It would be 100x times harder for me to get paid via small sponsorships like this.
There's hundreds of YC companies building open source, look for them, apply to the ones you like. Enjoy.
And HN who's hiring has gotten me several contracts/gigs in the past so can vouch for its usefulness too
Kudos on the great product and project, I am sure it's a great company to work at!
I Just Hit $100k/year On GitHub Sponsors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23613719 - June 2020 (493 comments)
What's not fun is being an unpaid open source maintainer that has to deal with toxic "open issues" by ungrateful people on the web.
I wish github would have a system where you need to donate $1 to open an issue and it's down to the maintainers to decide whether it's a good issue or claim the $1 if the issue opened is kinda toxic.
No one is forcing you to accept issues, toxic or not, same goes for patches. In open source, you create your own project and you run it however you want.
Its also being abused in some areas on youtube right now with people deploying malicious code from the tutorials. The code isn't hosted on github its hosted on IPFS
There are many reasons why quitting your day job and growing a presence that will get you sponsorships is worthwhile, and I am a strong advocate for paying open source devs who maintain the packages you use. However, if you're thinking of trying to copy Caleb's success, remember that it'll take 28 years before he'll have earned more than he would have if he'd kept his $90k/year job.
Arguably a talented dev will never earn more than if they'd had a job instead. Open source is a route to working on something you love, but you will be leaving money on the table to do it unless the landscape changes a lot.
There is still a ton of change necessary in the open source model before it becomes a viable 'job' for most people.
Sorry, I'm having a brain fade here. Are you talking about the time required to make up for lost earnings (and ignoring that the current 112k is not a fixed amount the way a salary generally is)?
I mean, the math is very much simplified. People get raises, and change roles, and there's tax to deal with, and jobs have benefits, etc. The core point is that you'll probably earn a lot more in a job. If you can find one where you're paid to maintain a library you like that's probably better for you financially than trying to get sponsors.
With all that said. There is definitely some survivor bias here. He found a great niche and a appears to already have had an audience which helps tremendously compared to starting from scratch. Not everyone will have the same success experience.
Hoping I can get a similar thing going in the near future.
People willing to put money into your product sends a great signal about its quality/usefulness.
This is a great model for generating useful OSS projects.
Why not crypto? Seems pretty good for a problem like yours.
Why not other stripe-like providers which financial backing/integrations aren't run by american prudish double standard will deal with the cartel but not with a legal pot seller banks.
You've mollie which is very stripe-like and from the netherlands, sure there's more possibility they allow you than others.
Stripe is bringing crypto a la coinbase soon, could you use that with them?
My industry does not have wide support for crypto payments (which is a surprise); it's still difficult to turn it back into USD (eg: crypto.com, coinbase.com don't allow it).
We do accept some crypto payments but it mostly stays in the crypto space; until get to pay someone else that takes it. It's a PITA for taxes however.
In USA our payments are handled by typical banks/providers (except the one mentioned here). It's not like we're totally blocked.
I'm working on the upcoming release (hopefully by the end of this month) which will make it a lot easier to add stripe-like checkout systems, so you can have a donation page or even "sell" sponsorship packages.
And yes, to get it on github [1] sponsors was a royal pain. Github/Stripe kept denying my application because they thought I was asking for crypto payments.
[0]: https://hub20.io