I’ve been an independent open source maintainer for the last four years. That means I work on shared projects online instead of for any one company. And although I’m going back to full-time work later this month, being able to directly contribute to web development tooling for four years has been incredibly fulfilling and rewarding.
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 shows where that money came from and how it’s changed since my 2024 Finances. 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 $73,293 for 2025. $52,265 of that was for open source work.
My open source income grew ~12% from 2024’s $46,561. Here’s how 2025’s income split compares to previous years:
Total Income - Years
Table of Numbers
| Year | Total Income | Open Source | Non Open Source | % Open Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $73,293 | $52,265 | $21,028 | ~71% |
| 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% |
This year reversed the trend of skewing income more towards open source from other channels. But it was still nice to see the totals for both increase overall.
Months Breakdown
I think the per-month breakdown of my sources is also useful for showing whether my open source income was stable through the year.
Here’s how each revenue source contributed to my totals for each month:
Months Breakdown
Table of Numbers
| Month | Total Income | Open Source | Other Work | % Open Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Average | $6,108 | $4,355 | $1,752 | ~71% |
| January | $4,281 | $3,903 | $378 | 91% |
| February | $4,109 | $3,227 | $882 | 79% |
| March | $3,801 | $3,326 | $475 | 87% |
| April | $5,220 | $4,117 | $1,104 | 79% |
| May | $16,337 | $3,343 | $12,994 | 20% |
| June | $4,536 | $3,980 | $556 | 88% |
| July | $3,258 | $2,845 | $413 | 87% |
| August | $4,880 | $3,659 | $1,221 | 75% |
| September | $4,416 | $3,956 | $460 | 90% |
| October | $5,032 | $4,190 | $842 | 83% |
| November | $4,989 | $3,758 | $1,231 | 75% |
| December | $12,435 | $11,962 | $473 | 96% |
My income was mostly stable through the months, except for two large spikes:
- Open source: end-of-year surge in GitHub Sponsors (thanks again, AWS SDK team!) and typescript-eslint (holiday bonuses)
- Other work: a sizeable private corporate gig in May
If it weren’t for those spikes, my total year intake would have been around $50-$60k.
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 private consulting and Learning TypeScript book sales.
Here are the individual categories of income:
Total Income - All Sources
Table of Numbers
| Source | Income |
|---|---|
| typescript-eslint | $22,276 |
| Consulting | $12,625 |
| GitHub Sponsors | $11,786 |
| Mocha | $7,019 |
| ESLint | $6,800 |
| Learning TypeScript royalties | $5,553 |
| Tidelift | $2,900 |
| Podcasts | $2,800 |
| Yeoman | $1,394 |
| thanks.dev | $90 |
| Twitch | $50 |
| Total | $73,293 |
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.
Open Source Services Breakdown
The projects breakdown is good for seeing how I earned my income, but doesn’t accurately reflect where that revenue comes from. Some services such as thanks.dev and Tidelift send income for multiple projects.
Here’s a view of how much income came through each open source income service:
Total Income - All Services
Table of Numbers
| Source | Income |
|---|---|
| Open Collective | $25,891 |
| Tidelift | $12,241 |
| GitHub Sponsors | $11,786 |
| thanks.dev | $2,347 |
| Total | $52,265 |
This breakdown shows an interesting difference from per-source: although my personal projects mostly weren’t sponsored by thanks.dev, it did contribute to larger projects I work on such as typescript-eslint. That difference is a symptom of most of my smaller packages not being adopted largely in open source. Most of my impact has been in bigger projects.
Reflecting on 2025
This was a mostly-positive year for me.
$73k was ~91% of my original goal of $80k total income for 2025. Both numbers are unusually high for open source. I’m very proud of getting as far as I have. I’ve put a lot of time, effort, and thought into making open source maintenance a sustainable job.
This will be my last year for the foreseeable future as an independent open source maintainer. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the lower income compared to typical corporate roles wasn’t a big factor in switching back to them. But also, it’s lonely and isolating to work independently the way I have. Although I managed to make open source income workable for myself, none of my projects have similarly active independent open source maintainers. I miss working on a sustained team with a myriad of other roles (yes, even a manager!). So while I’m proud of what I’ve achieved over the last four years, now feels like the right stopping point. I’m starting a new job at Sentry in February 2026.
I’ll publish a full blog post soon recapping 2025. It’ll focus both on my thoughts on independent open source maintenance as well as individual project milestones.
Your Support Matters
The best way you can support open source maintainers like me is to sponsor us. That money goes directly to us and helps us focus on open source work. The more maintainers who can spend more time in open source, the better the ecosystem is — both for software and for the experience of being a maintainer.
Each of the larger projects I’m on the team of have an Open Collective you can support financially:
- opencollective.com/eslint
- opencollective.com/flint-fyi
- opencollective.com/mochajs
- opencollective.com/typescript-eslint
Although I’m personally going to no longer be dependent on the income, sponsoring these projects helps sustain development for the maintainers who are.
To more broadly to support your dependencies, two aggregator services are particularly good for distributing 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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