Back in 2015 Gratipay hosted it’s second ever retreat; the idea was a full weekend of hacking and building with all of our normally-remote members of the team. The thing you need to know about Chad is he is exceptional at bringing people together and spreading his passion. I arrived a bit early to the retreat and was tasked by Chad to cook dinner. It sounded easy enough; I need to make dinner for 10 or so people, something easy like sandwiches would work right? That was when Chad brought out the giant oven-sized dutch oven, I couldn’t believe we would be making so much food for 10 people! I was peeling potatoes for hours! Turns out that night we fed over 50 amazing people from Chad’s life. All of his friends, neighbors, churchgoers, family, peers, and even random people he had inspired at the local pub.<p>And every time I hung out with Chad it was like this, people from all over the world, in all sorts of backgrounds and difficulties made it a point to be Chad’s friend.<p>Chad, you may think you didn’t get to change the world with Gratipay, but you did, you are the catalyst that will change the world for the better. Thank you.
I've been trying to figure out how to get paid to do open source for a long time. The popularity of my open source projects has changed over this time, but this might give you an idea of the effectiveness of each approach if you need an alternative.<p>I used Gittip for a while, and it was a really nice platform, and netted me $5-15/month if I recall correctly. I left after some regulatory issues added an annoying amount of mental gymnastics to actually get money out of it. Later I built my own self-hosted platform for getting tips [1][2]. This tends to net me $20/month consistently, with occasional bursts due to one-time donations. Also, I know of at least one other installation in the wild, it's being used to support some Mastodon instances.<p>A few months ago, I set up a Patreon [3] where I earn almost $200/month. This is by far the most successful approach I've seen yet, though it rustles my jimmies a bit to be beholden to a proprietary, centralized service. In the end I'm still not making enough to work on open source full time. Thankfully I make enough today to break even on open source (that is, my infrastructural costs are paid for). Hopefully I can figure something out for full time eventually. It's <i>hard</i>.<p>Many thanks to the folks at Gratipay. It was an uphill battle for sure but they fought the good fight.<p>[1] <a href="https://drewdevault.com/donate" rel="nofollow">https://drewdevault.com/donate</a><p>[2] <a href="https://github.com/SirCmpwn/fosspay" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/SirCmpwn/fosspay</a><p>[3] <a href="https://patreon.com/sircmpwn" rel="nofollow">https://patreon.com/sircmpwn</a>
Thanks for the send-off, everyone. Feels right somehow to hit the HN homepage one more time before putting Gratipay to bed. So many lessons learned, already scheming about Next Time™.<p>See you down the line! :D
I met Chad when I lived in Pittsburgh and we had great times regularly hacking on Gratipay in a coffee shop. Chad would teach regulars how to code by making them do small pull requests on the project. Even when Patreon swooped up the market he had a profound sense of why the project still mattered -- Gratipay was open source, took no fees, and was funded entirely on its own platform. Chad you are a badass, cheers man!
> provocateurs continued to take advantage of Gratipay’s overly welcoming nature, until we had to admit that yes, online communities really do require moderation.<p>I really appreciate Chad's honesty, humility, and transparency in all of this. I'm really glad to have these words in writing from someone who put so much effort into trying to do the right thing. I hope these words are heeded not just by the startups of today and tomorrow, but also by the megacorps now finding themselves unable to explain to an angry public what's going on on their platforms.
At the end of the "gittip crisis" it seems that they capitulated to the demands of a group of users who felt unsafe sharing information about how much money they made. Users who had mostly already left. I think this was a big mistake, as the "leader-board" features provided important social-proof that gratipay worked. That you could make money from it. Tracking how much money projects gave to other projects was good UX, it meant you could feel good about giving money to a large meta-project, because you knew it was passing that money down to smaller projects it depended on.<p>After they made the decision to remove leaderboards I mostly lost interest.
I used Gratipay for a while, and I even contributed with one or two commits, I was also hanging around the IRC chatroom.<p>I am so incredibly envious of the passion, work-morale and ambitions that I saw in Chad Whitacre, what a great guy. I am sad that Gratipay shut down, and I am sad for all the roadblocks the project have had, I used it to donate to a few projects and it was great for that.<p>I hope Chad will find something worthwhile to do after Gratipay.
Startups are ridiculously hard. The biggest mistake young founders and companies make is going heads down in code for 3, 6, 12 months without marketing and sales. I've been there and failed.<p>What is the market? Is it a good one? Open source while incredible, is damn difficult to build a proper business.<p>I'll reiterate my stance that the best products with the best technology often times don't win. That doesn't mean that you should not strive for perfection in products, it just means there is more to the game than that.
Patreon has cornered the market on funding projects which otherwise have not much revenue potential. I’ve been seeing more and more open source projects switching to that model. (The only bad thing about Patreon is no option for one-time contributions)
Wow they were really committed to resolving their issues in public. It's pretty interesting to go through their github issues.<p>It's amusing to contrast the difficulty of tipping another internet user before cryptocurrency and after. Due to regulatory cost it's still rough for a company to act as a conduit using cryptocurrencies, but accept a tip from another internet user is as easy as (BTC): 18bsU4fM14AbiQ6aXSRc7XSnduT75cCigX
Liberapay seems pretty good, a lot like older gittip in UX. Leaderboards and all. I'd be interested in hearing more about it, why it split from gittip, etc. I may use it instead of patreon, but there's not a lot of information about, well, how it was founded.<p>I suspect I will be switching my matrix donation from patreon to liberapay. It would have been nice to know that was an option.
It's pretty interesting when companies implode in a way that's clearly visible on a graph.<p>The Digg traffic stats look similar in summer of 2010 after their controversial redesign where you can clearly see their users leaving for reddit: <a href="https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-06-01%202011-06-30&q=digg,reddit" rel="nofollow">https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2005-06-01%202...</a>
They were one of the pioneers in the space of sustainability around open source, which led to many of the wonderful projects we have today. Thanks to Chad for putting so much work in over the years towards a worthwhile mission.
Having helped out very little with this project - it makes me sad to see it go. Chad is a great guy and means well in all that he does.<p>I wish him the best :)
Well, dang. I'd just recently setup an account with Gratipay for our OSS projects. It's not brought in any money, but it seemed like the most transparent and OSS-friendly platform for raising funds.<p>Sorry to see it go. Funding OSS is a very, very, hard problem.