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19 Comments

I Just Hit $100k/yr On GitHub Sponsors! ๐ŸŽ‰โค๏ธ (How I Did It)

  1. 7

    Hey Folks,

    I've perused this site for years and never actually made an account... until today!

    I finally feel like I have something worth sharing on here.

    Hopefully, there are some tips in that post for other people wanting to make a go of open source.

    1. 1

      This was such an amazing read Caleb! 19 year old dev here very inspired to turn my open-source passion solutions into 'sponsorware' ;)

      1. 1

        That's awesome! I hope you do it and have success!

  2. 1

    Congrats, Caleb! And thanks for sharing your story.

  3. 1

    Very inspiring post. Loved reading about your journey and cant wait to here more. I love the whole idea of sponsorware, it's such a good way for open source devs to make money. I also loved the idea for making educational videos on your own projects. You can also release these videos on places like Udemy and this can help build up more awareness of your projects.

    I feel like I have a very long way to go to get to your level and at the moment feels like a bit of an impossible task but it seems like my starting steps should be to hone my skills by developing small projects that I think might be useful and try to build an audience along the way. During the development process I might find some features missing from a language or framework and if I'm skilled enough to implement it myself I might be able to replicate your success.

    I'll have to see if I can find a way to monetize the small projects that I develop along the way as I learn but I suppose that will all depend on the projects that I build.

  4. 1

    Well done, congrats.
    Thanks for the tips. Sponsorware is super interesting.

  5. 1

    @calebporzio, AlpineJS user here. What a game changer, my friend. Always looking forward to more updates. Thanks for sharing your open source success story. You deserve every last penny, and more!

  6. 1

    Congrats! Success stories are always a welcome read

  7. 1

    Congrats! Love this!

  8. 1

    Congrats @calebporzio
    What would be your advice to someone just starting with front end dev and OSS? Where should one start?

  9. 1

    Cool,Congratulation.
    there are a lot generous people out there

  10. 1

    Awesome story, congrats!

    I just started using AlpineJS this week actually! Never knew it was an Indie Hacker project. It's really cool, I'm enjoying it a lot.

  11. 1

    "Transparency is health."

    This is what Open Startup List is all about :)

  12. 1

    This is amazing!
    The concept of sponsorware is genius!

    and also I am so proud of people who are donating to you for doing open-source and coding!
    Congrats and I hope you can sponsor other people going forward! (paying it forward mentality goes a loing way!)

  13. 1

    This is amazing man! You've inspired me. I've been thinking a lot about open sourcing one of my projects but didn't see a viable path.

    I love how you added premium features for subscribers. That is genius (and could probably be a stand alone product now that i think about it).

    Thanks for going first!

  14. 1

    That was a great read, and congrats! Also checked out the link to AlpineJS - that's pretty awesome and something I've looked for in the past - although not sure if it handles the case of HTML being embedded dynamically.

    Amazing tools, and you deserve the success!

    Couple interesting things to me:

    • I take it the following is what made this work? Any idea how many followers you had to get started?
    • Educational content isn't always as fun as dev, but I actually kind of enjoy recording usage videos and stuff when it's really helping people.
    • This seems like it works better for dev tools. I like to build apps, which seem like they'd be harder to grow in the same way. I also could very well be wrong, esp if the apps integrate into other tools.

    Fascinating all around. I figured oss is not the way to go based on one project I released to crickets a couple years ago, but this clearly shows a path to success :)

  15. 1

    Nice write up, thank you! I shared it with a friend who is a prominent open source developer and who really deserves to have a much higher sponsorship rate. There are some great tips there which can benefit anyone.

  16. 1

    Nice. Congrats! @calebporzio

  17. 1

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