Caleb Porzio Avatar

Caleb Porzio

Caleb Porzio changelog.com/posts

I just hit $100,000/yr on GitHub Sponsors 🎉

I am now making more money than I’ve ever made while developing open-source software for a community that I adore. Pinch me, I’m dreaming.

Was it luck? there’s certainly been a lot of that.

Was it fate? Let’s leave religion out of this mmkay?…

Was it that the software I built was so incredibly compelling that it forced 535 people to give me at least $14/mo. to keep working on it? …I wish.

It’s more than that though. There were some key things I did along the way to get here. Let me tell you all about them.

The Changelog The Changelog #381

The dawn of sponsorware

Caleb Porzio is the creator & maintainer of Livewire, AlpineJS, and more. His latest open source endeavor was announced as “sponsorware”, which means it lived in a private repo (only available to Caleb’s GitHub Sponsors) until he hit a set sponsorship threshold, at which point it was open sourced.

On this episode, we talk through this sponsorware experiment in-depth. We learn how he dreamt it up, how it went (spoiler: very well), and how he had to change his mindset on 2 things in order to make sustainability possible.

  0:00 / 0:00