I’m an independent open source maintainer. That means I work on shared projects online instead of for any one company. It’s incredibly rewarding work and I love being able to directly contribute to web development tooling.
The downside of this independent work is that I don’t receive a salaried paycheck. I’ve also mostly moved away from contract or freelance work. Instead, my income largely comprises of community sponsorships directly related to my open source work.
This blog post breaks down where that money came from and how it’s changed since my 2023 in Review > Living Wage in Open Source. I publicize this breakdown to show what it’s like being in open source the way I am and to be transparent about donations.
Let’s dig in!
Total Income
I took in a total income of roughly $60,191 for 2024. $47,269 of that was for open source work.
2024 continued my trend of increasing income directly from open source and decreasing income from other sources such as consulting. My open source income grew ~24% from 2023’s $38,000. Here’s how 2024’s income split compares to previous years:
Total Income - Years
| Year | Total Income | Open Source | Non Open Source | % Open Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | $60,191 | $46,561 | $13,630 | ~77% |
| 2023 1 | ~$63,700 | ~$38,000 | ~$25,700 | ~60% |
| 2022 1 | ~$41,100 | ~$20,400 | ~$20,700 | ~50% |
Happy note: I earned more from my independent open source work in 2024 than I did from both open source and non open source independent work in 2022.
Less happy note: I was hoping to get to $80,000 total income this year. More on that later.
Sources Breakdown
A majority of my income comes from open source projects, and a majority of that is from bigger names. That income is supplemented by other sources — mostly Learning TypeScript book sales.
Here are the individual categories of income:
Total Income - All Sources
| Source | Income |
|---|---|
| typescript-eslint | $22,772 2 |
| Mocha | $8,588 |
| Learning TypeScript royalties | $7,368 |
| GitHub Sponsors | $6,230 |
| ESLint | $5,487 |
| Consulting | $4,262 |
| Tidelift | $2,587 |
| Podcasts | $2,000 |
| thanks.dev | $897 |
| Total | $60,191 |
I’m glad to have a diverse set of income sources in open source. The small- and medium-sized web dev tooling projects I work tend to fluctuate in popularity over time. You don’t want any one fluctuating project to be a supermajority of income: when it inevitably wanes, so too will overall income.
Months Breakdown
I think the per-month breakdown of my sources is also important for showing whether my open source income was stable through the year. Spoiler: about half of it was, but as I became more busy with conference organizing and moving to the Boston area during the fall, my income slipped.
Months Breakdown
| Month | Total Income | Open Source | Other Work | % Open Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| January | $7,467 | $4,894 | $2,573 | 66% |
| February | $6,165 | $5,040 3 | $1,125 | 82% |
| March | $5,119 | $4,704 3 | $415 | 92% |
| April | $5,233 | $4,408 | $825 | 84% |
| May | $7,555 | $3,530 | $4,025 4 | 47% |
| June | $4,499 | $2,811 | $1,688 | 62% |
| July | $3,500 | $3,012 | $488 | 86% |
| August | $4,045 | $3,393 | $652 | 84% |
| September | $4,163 | $3,719 5 | $444 | 89% |
| October | $4,086 | $3,232 | $854 | 79% |
| November | $2,471 | $2,009 | $462 | 81% |
| December | $7,329 | $6,562 6 7 | $767 | 90% |
Reflecting on 2024
This was a mixed year for me.
$60k is unusually high for an independent open source maintainer. I’m very proud of it. That number represents a ton of effort in onboarding to new projects and consistently motivating myself to work on the various parts of open source maintenance.
Still, $60k is objectively not a very good number for a US-city-based software developer with a decade of experience. I used to make over $200k base salary as a full-time staff developer.
I’d hoped to hit a total income of $80,000 this year by again doubling my open source income at the expensive of half my other income. My other income did fall by about half again but my open source income only rose by about 1.25x.
I think my income remained stagnant for a few reasons:
- There were a higher-than-expected number of higher-than-expected project costs in 2024:
- Supporting ESLint flat config and ESLint 9 in typescript-eslint took up much more of my Spring months than I expected
- I burned out organizing SquiggleConf 2024 in September and was largely out of commission in October and part of November
- We moved to the Boston area in the Fall, which in retrospect I should have predicted would siphon my energy and time
- We adjusted monthly reimbursements in typescript-eslint, reducing payments by ~60% 8
- I stopped consulting work after May: it’s lucrative but takes time away from open source
- Learning TypeScript is past its peak book sales period, dropping its intake by ~2/3
A $60k salary is not the end of the world for me. I have a spouse supporting me and savings from years in industry. But it’s not long-term sustainable and I need to continue to grow it if I want to stay independent in open source.
I’ll publish a full blog post soon on my plans for the 2025 year. It’ll focus both on my financial goals as well as the individual projects’ milestones.
Your Support Matters
The best way you can support me financially is to sponsor me on GitHub Sponsors. That money goes directly to me and helps me focus on open source work.
Each of the larger projects I’m on the team of have an Open Collective you can support financially:
- opencollective.com/typescript-eslint
- opencollective.com/mochajs
- opencollective.com/eslint
- opencollective.com/yeoman
To more broadly want to support your dependencies, several aggregator services can distribute your donations:
Even better than sponsoring me yourself, if you work at a profitable company, consider advocating for your employer to sponsor open source or even sign the Open Source Pledge. Companies sharing some of their profit is a much more sustainable route for the ecosystem than individual charitable donations.
Support doesn’t have to be financial. Just sharing the word about the importance of open source software and its maintainers can help share the word about how important support is. Sharing is caring.
If you do have time, maybe spend a bit of time helping out on GitHub on projects I work on that you find useful. The beautify of open source is that it’s open. If you want something, you can always go do it yourself. Who knows, maybe you’ll fall in love with open source the way I did. 💚
Sincere thanks to the many people who sponsored me and/or worked on sponsorship platforms. You all made my work possible. I can’t thank you enough.
Footnotes
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2024 is the first year with precise numbers for totals. I’d rounded the totals for 2023 in Review and don’t have the energy or time to re-calculate them more precisely. ↩ ↩2
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I received $15,675.38 via Open Collective, $5,500 via Tidelift, and $1,597.25 via thanks.dev for typescript-eslint work in 2024. ↩
-
I procrastinated filing my monthly typescript-eslint expense for January, so it was paid in March instead of February. I backdated it in February to normalize the monthly data. ↩ ↩2
-
I received a final $2,500 payment in May for past curriculum development work with Codecademy. I’d since stopped that work, which is why only May has such a high Other Income amount. ↩
-
September was the month we finished setting up Mocha expenses. I received $7,250 for older work: $3,200 for November and December 2023; $2,400 for January through March 2024; $800 for April through June 2024; $850 for July 2024. The data is backdated and normalized by averaging the payments across the months they span and shifting forward one or two months. That’s: $1,100 a month for January and February 2024; $850 a month for March through May 2024; $700 a month for June through July 2024; $550 a month for August and September 2024. ↩
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I received $1,200 from Mocha via Open Collective in December 2024 for October 2024. I backdated it in the data to November 2024 to align with Open Collective payments typically taking only one month, not two. ↩
-
I gave myself a $1,700 “Thanksgiving bonus” for typescript-eslint via Open Collective in December 2024. A new contributor had previously declined roughly that amount in reimbursements over the last few months. ↩
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We’d been basing the monthly stipend on an optimistic Open Collective yearly budget estimate. That led to our reserves running low sooner than expected. When we switched in April to their more realistic money-per-month budget, my monthly stipend dropped from ~$1800 to $1100. ↩
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