GitHub Sponsors have a page called Explore GitHub Sponsors where, if you are logged in, you will find all the people who developed one or more of your dependencies who are accepting money via GitHub Sponsors.
For me the top person is Sindre Sorhus. This is slightly strange as he is a JavaScript developer who maintain more than 1100 npm packages, but I guess I have some projects in my repositories that use those packages. It is strange as I hardly write any JavaScript code. I wonder if this list also depends on forked repositories or only the one I own?
GitHub profile
Anyway I already mentioned Sindre in another post as I found his retro GitHub profile funny.
GitHub Sponsors profile and home page
The GitHub Sponsors profile of Sindre Sorhus is much more serious and then there is the web site of Sindre Sorhus which is really nice.
Sources of income
While as I understand the income of Sindre is exclusively from open source projects, he goes way beyond GitHub Sponsors though. On his web site you can find several other ways to offer donations. He has some serious supporters. He also sells apps of the iPhone. It is unclear to me if those are also Open Source.
GitHub Sponsors
There are currently 249 sponsors, but as I mentioned he uses other platforms as well for accepting donations.
The tiers start from $5 with the sponsors badge, trough mentions on the supporters page to $1000 / month showing the logo on some very busy GitHub repositories, some of the most popular “awesome lists”.
On the supporters page there are
8 companies that pay at least $1000 / month each
6 that pay $100 / month.
5 people pay $50 / month.
114 who pay $10 / month.
There are also a lot of past supporters listed.
So roughly 10,000 USD / month. It seems like quite a good income, especially given that in Bangkok, Thailand the cost of living is much lower than in the “Western world”.
What do sponsor get?
Their name or their logo will be displayed on some rather busy pages. There is no other specific promise.
Conclusion
On one hand it is very encouraging to see that it is possible to generate that kind of an income, on the other hand this is really discouraging. He seems to much more talented than I am….
There is clearly a lot more to learn from Sindre on how to achieve such a level of income that allows him to focus entirely on hist Open Source projects.
Follow me / Sponsor me
If you’d like to read more such posts, don’t forget to upvote this one, to follow me here on DEV.to and to sponsor me via GitHub Sponsors.
