How do you monetize open source?

Developers who have started dabbling in the open source space often wonder:

• Can you live a normal life off of open source contributions?
• Can you build a business on top of open source software?
• Can you make open source software your business?

All of the answers to the above questions are the same: yes but it's not easy.

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You might be wondering why are you writing this? Who on earth are you?

I am orlie, working on OSS and building in public.

My goal is to create a profitable open source business with my best friend.

For starters, we're building a Stripe App that is completely open source to sync data between Salesforce and Stripe! Curious? Check it out here

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In over 15 years of building stuff online I have NEVER heard of someone who launched something from scratch into the open source world and started making money right away.

Most times there's a story of long hours of grinding behind it. 🤯

You might wonder, so how can I do it?
How can I monetize open source software I write?

Glad you asked.

Here are various ways to monetize yourself or business the open source way.

How I have seen monetization succeed in open source

1. Donations & Sponsorships

Perhaps the most common way to support open source project and their maintainers.
For businesses it makes sense to sponsor development: it ensures the project stays stable, up-to-date and actively maintained.
You can sponsor a whole project OR individually the people that work on the project.

Regardless of the platform you're using to ask for recurring donations, if you're able to market your open source software or library to a community you can monetize...your community.
Bootstrap, cURL, Vue.js and many other projects use this method.

If you have $1 donation from 10000 people, that's $10,000 a month. You can use Github sponsors, OpenCollective or Patreon. There are many other

2. Paid features as open source projects add-ons

Easier said than done because most businesses do not start as open source projects. Those who do usually follow this path:
1) They create an open source solution
2) They realize there's a paid market
3) They add extra features to the open source solution and charge for them
Notable examples:

• Docker
• Kong
• IntelliJ

Other businesses do the opposite, they take their closed source software and rebuild a light version for "community use"

3.Charge for running the software on behalf of your customers

Simple enough business model once you create the infrastructure - as this can scale massively - you can get paid to manage your customer's instances of an open source software.

Forum and blog engines like Ghost are a prime example of companies that managed to monetize open source by providing hosting. Another example is Bitbucket and Github's rival...Gitlab!

👀 BTW, did you know that the software that runs dev.to is open-source but you will be soon able to pay for someone to run it for you:

4.Paid consulting and support

Nginx PRO is a prime example of software which is open source practically but you can be paid to support the installation.
You are not hosting the software for your customers but you're helping them configure it in a way that works best for them.

5. A company hires you to maintain your project

Some companies will hire developers/teams of devs to maintain an open source project on which they rely heavily

In an ideal world if you write software and it gets used, you'd be able to capture some share of that value. But we're not there yet.

In a great universe this model would be not needed, every company that is profitable (and non-profitable too) should:
Create and maintain open source libraries
Updating documentation, samples and tutorials
Push forward the level of technology by innovating.

But alas, we're far away from those models