Some ways open-source devs can make money

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 The amount of money you can make from open source code depends on several factors. First of all, the popularity of your open source project plays a significant role that determining your possible revenue. On top of that, adoption and credibility play an essential role.

Credibility can be expressed in various ways. How fast do you respond to new issues? Do you frequently maintain the code? It’s unlikely that an infrequently maintained project will receive a lot of adoption. Therefore, monetization chances will be lower.

However, there are plenty of monetization options you can employ — even for projects with low adoption.


Here are four methods you can employ:

1. Software as a Service

An open source project that has generated plenty of demand can choose to offer a Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. This model is most viable for projects that offer a complete application, such as a publishing platform, monitoring tool, or marketing automation tool.

Developers can choose to host the software themselves. However, this means that they have to take care of security, security, and maintenance.

It’s often much easier and cheaper to pay for a managed offering under a SaaS model. Developers pay a monthly fee to use the hosted solution. Therefore, they can focus on the tool itself instead of all maintenance-related tasks. Moreover, a marketing or content team often doesn’t have the required technical knowledge to host a solution themselves. For that reason, a SaaS solution is a great alternative to make money from open source software.

2. Paid feature requests

It’s not easy for smaller projects to earn revenue. Often, these developers have a daytime job besides maintaining an open source project. Therefore, they are limited in time to maintain their project.

Yet, if you happen to find a couple of companies using your project, you can offer paid feature requests. In other words, you develop new features based on a company’s request. In return, they pay you for developing the features they want.

It’s one of the most straightforward models to make money from open source software. Even a small project can find a few companies that are interested in using their open source software. Often, it’s cheaper for them to hire you as a freelancer to develop the new functionality they need than having their developers spend time figuring out the codebase and adding new functionality.

3. GitHub sponsors

Since May 23, 2019, GitHub introduced its GitHub Sponsors program.

The primary benefit of using GitHub Sponsors is that they charge zero fees. 100% of sponsorships go to the developers. The feature aims to reward developers for maintaining free software.


4. Get paid to build open-source extensions for existing products

Building open source extensions for existing, often paid, products can be an interesting path to explore for many developers. Did it ever happen to you that you paid for a service you wanted to integrate into your project, but the project didn’t offer an SDK for your programming language? In this situation, you had to write all API calls yourself.

However, some developers take the extra effort to develop an SDK for their programming language that wraps the product’s API. If you’ve developed an SDK or wrapper for a popular API, it’s likely your open source project will gain some traction.

This situation is an ideal starting point to negotiate a deal with the company providing the product.

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