I think there is maybe a middle ground here (that I haven't found personally) it _is_ really rewarding to have people use your work and provide feedback. Commercialization is conceivably a good way to do that (you get marketing and support). Never seen it work out that way, but I still think its possible.
edit: and of course engineers, you can maybe pay people to come and work with you..which can be alot more fun and extend your reach
It introduces business psychology, for one. You get all this and more, for free:
- An expectation of support which is likely based on the purchaser's subjective past experiences in receiving support, rather than on what's available in your support section
- Pushback from your new customers-who-are-always-right
- Passionate and very specific suggestions for improvement, _for free_, from people who paid and therefore believe they are your target audience
- A complimentary covert contract governing the vendor-purchaser relationship, to accompany whatever you previously made very clear, which they did not and will not read
- A noticeable dilution of others' perspective on your personal values--"ah, they are just sharing that link with us because they make money off of it"
These are just some of the possible outcomes...
Which is not to say it's not worth doing, but there are lots of important factors.
because I'm doing it for other reasons. trying to make money off it always ends up dominating the discussion and frankly I don't really care. why would I waste my time?
more importantly customers only ever want products that's are adjacent to the systems they already use. systems haven't changed that much in a long time and I'm really bored with chipping away at the edges when there is so much more interesting space to explore
I have a couple simple Android apps. I think they're too simple to warrant charging money. I did try with one, but it never took off and didn't make any ad revenue either. So I made it free.
The number of forms required, in my country, to (legally) make money from side projects - although not prohibitively large - would be akin to taking on a second self-employed job.
I think for mostly the same reasons as already mentioned; if I ask money, it is a job. Unless it is donations, asking money creates obligations. I have asked money for side projects in the past and it worked but they became actual jobs. That is a choice.
This is absolutely true for me, but for me it is somewhat of a difference between improving the product (donations) or having to answer actual support emails (paid product). The former I do for fun, the latter I really need people for because it takes up all your time. And that is a company/job and not a side project.
I agree. Donations or otherwise, the money comes with additional expectations -- from both yourself and your users -- that you may not want to take on.
Whenever someone pays for something, theirs an expectation of support.
Hell, even open source projects will have entitled brats opening up issues.
I have a job, I have no interest in you badgering me with complaints since you spent 15$. My next project is going to be free, I'll just ask for a retweet ( I hate Twitter and all social media, but it's the only way to promote projects now ).
I imagine if it becomes widely successful I'd sell it to a company which can do whatever they want with it.
Same here. I explicitly stated that I do not need any donations and if someone is so much in love with my product then there is a list of example charities they can send it to.
I don't want to host people's data or have to provide support. As long as it stays free and self-hosted I don't need to do either of those things. (ArchiveBox.io)
I think that, some day, money might be good enough that there can be micro-economies around side projects without bringing in all of the bloat, complexity, and expectations around current software revenue models. In my imagination, it would be less than project developers "charge" and more than users are able to easily "give" something back - even if just a little bit.
Because I'm utterly, utterly selfish; allow me to explain:
A dollar, euro, naira, deutschmark, ruble, yuan or yen has an imprint of life and context based on its' cultural origins (and the minter who produced it).
My business project (still a side-project at the moment, effectively) is imprinted -- to the git commit-level -- with the authorship of myself (and hopefully other contributors in future).
Given the choice between offering that software DNA (including, admittedly, plenty of faults) to other people to use and remix as they like, or to trade it for monetary units that are relatively-characterless in compensation -- even a billion such monetary units -- well, it's not really a choice that requires much consideration.
(regardless of the choice, the two options are equivalent at a technology/runtime level; they're a series of compute instructions that run locally or over a network to achieve result(s))
I want people to benefit from it. My contributions will be a tiny drop in a vast ocean of noise of humanity and that's OK. Several people, NGOs and charities already make use of my projects, and that gives me a sense of fulfillment.
If I start making moolah on my side project, it turns into my side job, and now I have another unfinished project on my wall of shame and failures.
To counteract my own snark - there are two reasons to work on something and mixing them can pervert either of them alone. I wish I could mix my passion and my income, but I am grateful I can experience passion on its own, as a graceful failure.
Because people use them because they’re free. I’m happy with the few android apps, and few web apps with a few thousand visitors that I have. I made those when I was free (pun intended) so there’s no point charging for them. And I can afford a few bucks a month on hosting so not a big deal.
Charging people money increases support costs (people get more upset if things don't work right). Getting paid 'beer money' to deal with additional support load isn't worth it to me.
Getting users IMHO is more important than bringing in minimal revenue (that an early state company would).
If I were to charge money, the side project would become a business, and running a business takes a lot of work. Why would I bother? I don't need or want a second job.
If I am going to write code in my free time, for the sake of something I feel personally motivated to create, I would rather share the results back to the world under an open-source license.
So true. My job pays me a lot of (ish) money. But my side projects give me fulfillment and challenges that my real job never could. Only "compensation" I'd love for my Side gig is adoption, appreciation and the good feeling that it is directly solving a personal itch but for others too!
I can’t lay claim to having made anything free that has taken the world by storm, but if I had I’d feel way more responsible to responding to requests (complaints) if I started charging for it.
I put a little custom app I wrote for my wife on the App Store, mainly as a learning experience. And I decided to charge a buck to keep the riff-raff away.
But that $1 makes me feel a real obligation to my users.. I've put in maybe 6 hours of work over ~5 years updating and supporting when a new OS update breaks something, all for an app that has generated about maybe a bit less than $100 of revenue.
I don't exactly mind. This is the learning experience I wanted. (I have other, more successful apps on the store, but as the programmer of a small team who didn't deal with the App Store beyond getting builds uploaded.)
Since I'm on Linux, I use a lot of software from people outside the big tech camp, such as the awesome kitty terminal.
There was a bug in it which unreported and when the developer fixed it in less than 24 hours, I signed up to give him 10 dollars per month. About 800 other people were already signed up and giving donations (possibly smaller).
People just like to give back, so make it easy to do and they will. But you need to make a product they use every day.
I slap ads on them since 2012, no effort, people get it for free, businesses get to put their products in front of potential customers. I know HN hates ads but they have allowed me to do drive-by projects that don't require maintenance and are pure passive. This way I can have a full-time job where I learn new things and work with other people without the pressure of running my own business.
For every question, it's the positive that should be answered (like Russell asked how do we know there isn't a teapot floating in space somewhere between Jupier and Mars).
Why should we monetize any side project?
Why should we not have activities we do without aiming to extract value out of them?
I charge people for my side project and at first I didn’t care about how much I made. After things picked up, I set higher goals for myself and suddenly something I loved turned into work. I no longer have as much interest in my project as I did when I first started.
The beauty of having a side project is that you can work on it whenever you want. By turning it into a business, you can no longer work on your own terms. (To some extent)
I accept donations for mine, and make about $100 a month. Though, some of that pays for the servers and other ongoing project costs. But I make it very clear that it’s a donation, and doesn’t get you anything! Still though, it’s a great way to get a little extra from the users, and not have to worry about server costs and other minor costs.
Yeah, same for me. As it grows it feels more like work now. Though the money is motivating me to grow it into a full-time business which would be awesome, and would give me flexibility to travel.
The part that I really enjoy about it now is helping users by adding features and helping them and how excited they are when I deliver exactly what they wanted.
Why would I charge for my side projects? I make more than enough money to support my family from my day job. And my side projects are labors of love, not a way to get more money. Not to mention that by not charging for it, it increases the audience for the project, and knowing that other people find it useful is its own reward.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadedit: and of course engineers, you can maybe pay people to come and work with you..which can be alot more fun and extend your reach
- An expectation of support which is likely based on the purchaser's subjective past experiences in receiving support, rather than on what's available in your support section
- Pushback from your new customers-who-are-always-right
- Passionate and very specific suggestions for improvement, _for free_, from people who paid and therefore believe they are your target audience
- A complimentary covert contract governing the vendor-purchaser relationship, to accompany whatever you previously made very clear, which they did not and will not read
- A noticeable dilution of others' perspective on your personal values--"ah, they are just sharing that link with us because they make money off of it"
These are just some of the possible outcomes...
Which is not to say it's not worth doing, but there are lots of important factors.
more importantly customers only ever want products that's are adjacent to the systems they already use. systems haven't changed that much in a long time and I'm really bored with chipping away at the edges when there is so much more interesting space to explore
Whenever someone pays for something, theirs an expectation of support.
Hell, even open source projects will have entitled brats opening up issues.
I have a job, I have no interest in you badgering me with complaints since you spent 15$. My next project is going to be free, I'll just ask for a retweet ( I hate Twitter and all social media, but it's the only way to promote projects now ).
I imagine if it becomes widely successful I'd sell it to a company which can do whatever they want with it.
A dollar, euro, naira, deutschmark, ruble, yuan or yen has an imprint of life and context based on its' cultural origins (and the minter who produced it).
My business project (still a side-project at the moment, effectively) is imprinted -- to the git commit-level -- with the authorship of myself (and hopefully other contributors in future).
Given the choice between offering that software DNA (including, admittedly, plenty of faults) to other people to use and remix as they like, or to trade it for monetary units that are relatively-characterless in compensation -- even a billion such monetary units -- well, it's not really a choice that requires much consideration.
(regardless of the choice, the two options are equivalent at a technology/runtime level; they're a series of compute instructions that run locally or over a network to achieve result(s))
To counteract my own snark - there are two reasons to work on something and mixing them can pervert either of them alone. I wish I could mix my passion and my income, but I am grateful I can experience passion on its own, as a graceful failure.
Charging people money increases support costs (people get more upset if things don't work right). Getting paid 'beer money' to deal with additional support load isn't worth it to me.
Getting users IMHO is more important than bringing in minimal revenue (that an early state company would).
If I am going to write code in my free time, for the sake of something I feel personally motivated to create, I would rather share the results back to the world under an open-source license.
When it’s free, easier to ignore those things.
I put a little custom app I wrote for my wife on the App Store, mainly as a learning experience. And I decided to charge a buck to keep the riff-raff away.
But that $1 makes me feel a real obligation to my users.. I've put in maybe 6 hours of work over ~5 years updating and supporting when a new OS update breaks something, all for an app that has generated about maybe a bit less than $100 of revenue.
I don't exactly mind. This is the learning experience I wanted. (I have other, more successful apps on the store, but as the programmer of a small team who didn't deal with the App Store beyond getting builds uploaded.)
Since I'm on Linux, I use a lot of software from people outside the big tech camp, such as the awesome kitty terminal.
There was a bug in it which unreported and when the developer fixed it in less than 24 hours, I signed up to give him 10 dollars per month. About 800 other people were already signed up and giving donations (possibly smaller).
People just like to give back, so make it easy to do and they will. But you need to make a product they use every day.
Why should we monetize any side project?
Why should we not have activities we do without aiming to extract value out of them?
The beauty of having a side project is that you can work on it whenever you want. By turning it into a business, you can no longer work on your own terms. (To some extent)
I use gitlab pages for my project, it works well enough. Nothing to worry about except to make sure the domains are paid.
The part that I really enjoy about it now is helping users by adding features and helping them and how excited they are when I deliver exactly what they wanted.