[alien_]

Same here, for most of my 15+ years career in IT I've been doing DevOps stuff, mostly writing small scripts and infrastructure code, occasionally hacking on existing projects enough to do drive-by contributions.

About 6 years ago I started AutoSpotting, an open source tool designed to reduce AWS costs by automatically replacing on-demand instances with up to 90% cheaper Spot instances, it was meant to be my playground project for learning golang.

I estimate it saved in aggregate in the tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars and multiple companies have been built around my code or reimplementing the same idea.

It's still a side project that I work on occasionally but at some point I tried to monetize it through support and custom development. I failed to get enough traction to become a full time job, currently make some $400/month from about a dozen users whom I sell precompiled binaries through Patreon.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

> I estimate it saved in aggregate in the tens or maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars and multiple companies have been built around my code or reimplementing the same idea.

> It's still a side project that I work on occasionally but at some point I tried to monetize it through support and custom development. I failed to get enough traction to become a full time job, currently make some $400/month from about a dozen users whom I sell precompiled binaries through Patreon.

We've had a lot of issues doing donations for cool projects like this. I'd really like a simple subscription service ala Gumroad so we can sign up for the "Enterprise" tier. Saving $100k we can totally kick back $5k to the person every month without feeling it.

[alien_]

That's exactly what I have been using Patreon for, it's not a donation but a subscription for an enterprise tier. Still very few people signed up for it, the OSS code is working well enough and there's very little friction in just using it.

Going forward I'm going to offer the enterprise stuff through the AWS marketplace, further reducing the friction, hopefully that will get more traction. It's just a lot of boring billing engineering work that I could have spent on improving the software.