Hi,

About four years ago, I started seriously considering monetizing OSS. Generally speaking, I develop OSS for my personal fun. It is not a job someone requested me to do, but something that I enjoy developing without other forces. I do not need to get paid for fun.

However, there are several issues for me. One is that I need to pay bills and prepare for the future. So, I need to earn money. Contract work helps, but usually it is not very related to my OSS projects. (BTW, I am open to an opportunity that is related to them.) So, it would be great if I can earn money directly from my OSS projects. Another issue is that while I enjoy very much starting a new project, maintaining it is a different story. I am proud of projects going well and I do not mean that I dislike maintaining them. That said, maintaining projects involves many non-coding tasks (while I love coding), and there are many chores and sometimes stressful things. So, it would be great to have some incentives, in this case, money.

Past Attempts

A long time ago, I created some courses, tutorials and a book. It was a good experience, but it took much time. I realized that I should spend more time on coding than creating courses. In 2022, I tried something different. I created a simple info product (like a tutorial video) that is not like a full course, but something much easier to create. The point of it was that the fee was not only for the info product itself, but also for supporting the project. However, it was more or less a one-time small donation and it does not last long unless we keep promoting it, which is too much work for me.

I think the general problem is that we should not expect individual developers to donate from their own pocket money. I think we should get sponsorship from companies who inherently get benefits from the OSS projects. That is kind of obvious, and someone advised me in the past as well. So, I decided to take on another challenge.

Using GitHub Sponsors

This time, I use GitHub Sponsors. I have already configured my GitHub Sponsors dashboard, but I did not pay much attention to sponsor tiers. Especially, I did not provide any specific rewards. This is because my assumption is that my product is my outcome. However, in recent years, I have learned that rewards are actually important for sponsorship.

The sponsorship program is called "Zustand Banner Sponsorship" and the idea is simple. We put sponsor logos in our README.md. I think it is pretty normal for sponsorship rewards.

How the Banner Works

As I do not want to change README.md every time sponsors change, I made a small website to show the list of sponsors and provide a banner image showing all sponsor logos, which will be embedded in README.md. I made this website with Waku and hosted it on GitHub Pages.

If you are interested, check out the banner image at the Zustand repository and click the banner.

If you are interested in sponsoring, click the "How to become a sponsor" button.

Happy coding.