[Applejinx]

It's called Patreon. You've got to be established, though: can't come out of nowhere with a thing and expect to see much traction.

I literally went from using Kagi for ten years, to using Patreon. At first it's a decimating change because you're going from 'sale of a product' to 'literally giving product away free and telling people they can support you if they like'.

However, if your cashflow isn't too tough, one benefit is that Patreon is a LOT more stable and predictable than shareware ever was. You stop having boom and bust product releases and instead have months where you grow kinda briskly and months where you grow not so briskly.

You're not making revenue off the product, you're making revenue off 'I am the one who makes products such as this'. I've got suggestions for what people should pledge if they would've bought my stuff commercially, but it's entirely voluntary and I'm also MIT-licensing it all. I'm airwindows on github, and as a website.

[john_moscow]

There's one big catch there - once you reach a "fair" income level, many people will think that you are already getting enough and won't bother to sponsor you.

Look at the statistics [0]: unless you are in the top 100 creators, you'll get far less than your regular FAANG pay.

[0]: https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators

[jolmg]

Huh. I didn't know Patreon published info on what creators are earning. Wouldn't that be a design flaw? What's the benefit to anybody? It seems to only deter potential sponsors.

[vidyesh]

I don't think Patreon does. As you can see you cannot see that information for every creator.

Publishers/creators can choose to show or hide the number of subscribers and their monthly earnings. This site simply is scraping that freely available information.

[ThePadawan]

Note that this wasn't the case in the beginning. It was only at some point that Patreon gave creators that choice - and I believe the default was to hide the earnings (but no the number of patrons).

[IloveHN84]

Design flaw? No, I think it's called "transparency"

[Uberphallus]

The good old battle between privacy and transparency! Nothing better to start a heated conversation: Finland publishes all personal taxes https://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2011/11/finland-publishes-al...

[jolmg]

"Transparency" is a pretty word, and I like transparency in a lot of things, but not in everything, and I don't think it's good here. I've given my reasons in another comment close to this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18468332

[jobigoud]

The way Patreon works is that you can set "achievements" levels and people coming on the page can see how far you are from the next goal. You have to publish the earnings for that feature. It entice people to contribute towards the goal so it's not a design flaw.

[anoncake]

So people can avoid sponsoring creators that already have a fair income level.

[jolmg]

Like john_moscow has pointed out, though, that deters people from becoming Patreon creators. It's very normal for people to underestimate the difficulty of what others do or the real worth of their work. Besides that, supporting someone economically in a capitalist environment is giving them your vote for them to continue doing what they're doing. Not voting for them, when you otherwise would, solely because you can see they have some quantity of votes already, disrupts that.

I would like this type of economy to flourish, as it seems like a very viable way to get good economic support for open-source. However, if this is a common occurrence, it seems developers will continue to be better off working on closed-source.

[anoncake]

What deters people from becoming Patreon creators is not being supported. I certainly would never voluntarily support someone if I for all I know they could already be grossly overpaid for what they do.

If supporting someone with X€ is any kind of "vote", it's a vote that they should get X€ more than they currently get for their work. It may be hard to make an educated decision about that, but it's impossible without knowing a creator's current income level to begin with.

[jolmg]

> If supporting someone with X€ is any kind of "vote", it's a vote that they should get X€ more than they currently get for their work.

No, think of each unit of currency as equaling 1 vote.

It's a vote that, between the various things that they could be doing, they should continue doing what they're currently doing.

For example, in a programmer's case, he could be employed by a company which will give $X votes. He could also be working freelancing gigs and earn $Y votes. He could start his own SaaS business and earn $Z votes. He could do open source work and earn through Patreon $W votes.

Only he will know where he stands in each of those markets, and, on average, you can bet that he will do what gives the most votes (i.e. money).

Not voting because you think he's got enough votes, is like not voting for a presidential candidate because you think he's got enough votes, despite otherwise wanting to vote for him/her. Imagine presidential voting was done such that you can see, in real-time, the votes of your preferred presidential candidate (without needing to vote for him/her) but not being able to see the votes of other candidates. That's pretty messed up, right? You see 10,000 people have voted for your candidate and think, "that's enough for him; he doesn't need my vote", and it turns out that other candidates have 100,000's of votes. It could be that the majority of the voting population would prefer your candidate, but because many of the people that preferred him didn't express themselves through their vote, someone else ended up being picked as president. That means the voting system failed, and that's why such transparency here is disruptive.

[auggierose]

"Fair" is relative.

[john_moscow]

It is and for most of the world the bar is around $3K/month.

[anoncake]

What do you mean?

[exlurker]

FAANG: An acronym for the market's five most popular and best-performing tech stocks, namely Facebook, Apple , Amazon, Netflix and Alphabet's Google.

[Applejinx]

Maybe people should not get FAANG pay… I started this sub-thread and to me, my life is a big experiment in what a life is even meant to be. I can't imagine seeing the Patreon blow up to the point that it's like FAANG pay (I had to look it up to even know what that was) and am not at all sure that it should: I live in Vermont and I'm gonna die at some point anyway, what's the use of having vast piles of cash left over?

[tonyedgecombe]

Looking at that list it seems to be all podcasts and porn, no developers.

[delroth]

https://www.patreon.com/seriallos (number 17) is software. So is https://www.patreon.com/RaiderIO (number 99).

[alangibson]

Interesting site. Now I see how AvE can pay the note on that new Haas CNC machine.