What alternatives do people have to monetize software in a more ethical way?
I particularly don’t understand the funding that some software receive. What they have to grant to receive those funds?
I also search for some type of monetization “model” better than donations, but more ethical than ads.
If it’s too much to explain I would be grateful for terms or books that I could search later.
thanks.dev and OpenCollective I think have had good concepts behind them. The main issue is that plenty of people have the same attitude/entitlement towards open source as if it’s a paid service or large company
I think I would have sought out anarchist communes and tailored my tool to their needs. If done well, I could have my needs met, lived comfortably and created tools that directly impacted my peers. I’d also be able to help out my commune in many other meaningful ways as well. The days would be filled with meaning instead of as a servent of the machine.
I run my project from donations, sponsorships and paid support services. Am now more than covering my living costs, and forwarding a fair bit on to other open source projects (mainly project dependencies). I have a recent breakdown of finances here.
Divinci Code was great! Are you planning any new novels?
Thanks, that’s very useful, I noticed that the the donations are a in a low amount compared to the rest of the income, but it is more stable, if possible could you share your experience with the ko-fi platform and donations? Do you think it is an visibility problem, since it’s hard to break from dev sphere to mainstream?
My Kofi donations will be relatively skewed since I started with GitHub sponsors for a time before, which is where most of my donations come from.
GitHub sponsors can make things quite frictionless compared to something like KoFi, but whether that helps may significantly depend on the audience for your software, since it’s less likely to be a benefit for non-technical/develop audience who don’t already have a GitHub account set up for business.
Ultimately, donations/sponsors are a hard grift, and what really matters is having an audience, and luck. I built up an audience for quite a few years before going down any kind of monetization route, but that meant I had an ecosystem to play into by that time. I have several routes of community engagement (Reddit, YouTube, PeerTube, Project Blog + Email updates, Discord) which help build, retain and personally connect with an audience, which I believe does help in this area.
Overall my donations (across KoFi and GitHub sponsors) has continued to grow, but more steadily after hitting an initial potential cap within my audience.
If interested, I have written a bit more about how I’ve acquired many of my sponsors here, and I recently created a visual breakdown of my 2024 donation/sponsor sizes here.
Paid support.
An interesting way that I don’t know of being implemented is a donation system where you donate to a feature request / issue and whoever implements / patches it gets it, and a “tax” so that some percentage of every donation can go to maintenance, server costs, etc.
Superteam kinda is similar with bounties
I like paid cloud or sync features for apps that you can do it yourself as well. Like Zotero or some writing apps
Cloud services or features monetization are interesting, I’ve seen some companies do a community or a local version and the business version with more features.
The slippery slope that projects taking this approach fall into boils down to ‘let’s put all our new features behind a business version and never add them to the community version until they become 2 totally different code bases’
What about a modular software, a base version and the modules are paid ? It would maybe avoid ramification? And the user would have more freedom.
What other examples? :)
I always imagined some sort of IP royalty, like you have an idea and implement it, then if someone build something over it for profit they need to pay a fixed percentage otherwise it would be free to use basically.
Sounds a bit like Rustdesk. I’m happily hosting a relay on my VPS but the ‘account’ features don’t work for the free version. I just keep them in a note instead.
Opensource and free to use, paid business feautures (like single sign on, telemetry) and support.
In blender for example you receive prioritized support when you sponsor them.
There are also various rewards (like voting on features, exclusive access to discord channels, having a sponsorship section on the website that acts as something like an ad).
There are various guides for this. but that’s the shortened version.
Paid builds. You get Access to the source code but you can either build yourself or pay a small amount to have a packaged built and updated whenever.
I also like the twice a year nag screen thunderbird or Wikipedia uses (KDE was right to start doing it too, in my books).
I don’t believe a small donate button in the “about” section of the settings screen is of any use.
Some projects try to use a funding bar, that is shown to the user, when the funding is in risk the users know and donate more. The nag screen is effective, but if you are a donor already it can become somewhat annoying.
Yeah any nag screen needs to be disabled for at least a period of time after a donation (permanently, or replaced with a quick thank you screen for ongoing contributions).
Clearly reporting finances and costs is nice to see too and makes it more compelling for contribute in my opinion. A few Lemmy instances are doing that now and it makes it easy to want to contribute if you can.
Good software is abstracted and free.
Applying it to a business effectively is where the money gets made ethically.
Contribute to the projects you use!
While I totally agree that this should be the case, I’m not sure it really works. Voluntary participation is among the first things to be cut when it comes to monetary gain maximization, and is often not even considered. And in some instances, like the publicly funded research institute I work at, there’s no funds dedicated to voluntary contribution to open source projects.
