Ask HN: How to stay open source and also make money?

There can be many ways to monetize your product, you need to start from the top - the problem you are solving and who does it help. I am assuming this is a developer tool as you are working with OSS model. Once you do that identify your user and go up the chain till the point you reach decision maker(writing is helpful--draw a map maybe?) . Find their pain points, solve for them and monetize your product. Happy to chat and brainstorm. My 2 cents from building a devtool.

To help you brainstorm, it would help before looking for ways to monetize, to establish a ballpark figure of how much money is to be made. Should this be enough to cover small leisures like a coffee or are you looking to live off this revenue entirely? How much money are you looking to make OP? how many X US dollars a month?

Are you currently accepting donations? If not, get that set up so your users can donate, by tier, if they are gaining value from your project.<p>If you want them to want to pay for the experience you need to provide an out of this world experience whenever they engage with your project.

You don&#x27;t.<p>Pick one and only one. It&#x27;s like asking &quot;how do I make money with acts of kindness&quot;.

To be honest, I think you have a bit of a self-defeating attitude. Building an open source project and then building paid tiers on top is not &quot;slimy&quot;. It&#x27;s one of the best and most sustainable ways to keep a project going. The alternatives are that it gets supported by a large company, in which case it becomes subservient to that company&#x27;s needs, or it eventually gets abandoned because people need to eat.<p>I really don&#x27;t understand the mindset that it&#x27;s slimy. I get the &quot;rug-pull&quot; thing, but just because you made a project with features a, b, and c that are free, why does that make it slimy to add paid features d, e, and f on top? People are <i>still</i> getting a, b, and c for free, so what&#x27;s the problem? There&#x27;s no rug-pull there.<p>Would it be better if a, b, and c never existed? It just seems like such a clear win-win to me.

<i>providing incentive to WANT to give the project money</i><p>If you want money, ask for it at least.<p>Requiring it is better because it makes your work sustainable.<p>Require enough of it that you are not trying to figure out how to avoid work.<p>You are not obligated to save other people money.<p>And if you feel like giving back, take some of the money you get and use it for food for people who don&#x27;t have enough to eat.<p>Good luck.

Traditionally, the best ways to make clean (a.k.a. not slimy) money in open source have been (a) offer a hosted tier for people who don&#x27;t want to selfhost (which only works for a server-style application) and (b) offer a paid support tier which guarantees a certain level of support; noncustomers take lower priority.<p>One method that I really like is paywalling software store versions of applications. You can still manually install from a GitHub page or something similar for free, but if you want to have auto updates and such via your software store, you can pay a small fee for that privilege. TaskbarX has used this method in the past, although I don&#x27;t know if they still are using it.