Item — HN Reader

I’ve seen few OSS burn out posts lately. I created gitignore.io and I’m thankful it wasn’t that successful because even the 5 hours a month I put in didn’t yield much financial compensation.

There should really be a more transparent way that projects like this, canihazip, gitignore, redis, and a bunch of other projects can be sustainably run.

1 comments

Looking at https://gitignore.io - there is plenty of empty space and nothing, even subtle and small like "I would appreciate donations" with link/button.

I also see nothing in https://github.com/toptal/gitignore.io and GitHub sponsoring seems to be not enabled.

(just mentioning in case you would make it more clear that you would be happy about donations)

I sold the site to Toptal 2 years ago, but trust me I had donate buttons, crypto donate buttons, I messaged multiple big tech firms that used my project to ask for sponsorships, I ran ads using carbon. I tried a lot of things over the 7 years of running it and lots of the avenues failed or didn't generate enough revenue.

Now I understand that the project was not that valuable but it would have been nice if I could have run it as a lifestyle business.