200 GitHub stars. 14 open issues from companies. 0 sponsors. I'm mass of burnt.

💻 Tech & Softwareby oss_burnout · 2w ago

▸ What I did

I maintain DataCheck — an open source data validation library for Python. Built it 2 years ago for my own projects, open-sourced it, and it slowly grew. 200 stars. Companies actually use it in production — I see it in their requirements.txt files when they post issues.

▸ What I expected

Once it reached a certain adoption level, sponsorships would come. Maybe $500-1K/mo from companies who depend on it. Enough to justify the time I spend.

▸ What actually happened

200 stars, 14 open issues (mostly feature requests from companies), a Slack channel with 60 people, and $0 in sponsorship. I spend 10-15 hours a week on maintenance, bug fixes, and answering questions from people who are using my free work to make money. I put up a GitHub Sponsors page 6 months ago. 1 sponsor: $5/mo from an individual dev. Companies using it in their CI/CD pipelines: silence.

▸ What I've tried so far

GitHub Sponsors with tier descriptions. Open Collective page. Put a "Sponsor" badge at the top of the README. Posted in the Slack channel asking companies to consider sponsoring. One company responded: "We appreciate open source and will explore this." That was 4 months ago. I'm genuinely considering either archiving the repo or relicensing to something dual-license.

🔗 DataCheck on GitHub

Progress Updates (1)

Been reading about how other OSS projects handle monetization. The dual-license model (AGPL for open source use, commercial license for companies) seems like the most honest approach — individuals and OSS projects still get it free, companies that profit from it pay. But every blog post says "you'll lose community goodwill." I already have 0 sponsors so how much goodwill is there really? Also looking at the "open core" model — keep the base library free, add a paid cloud validation service on top. Less controversial but way more work. Still thinking.

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