Monetize Open Source Without Paywalls, Sponsors, or Begging

The three funding models, honestly assessed

If you maintain something people depend on, you have probably tried at least one of these.

1. Donations

Conversion on a donate button is brutal. The overwhelming majority of users of a free tool will never pay for it, and the ones who would are usually individuals rather than the companies extracting the most value. Donations also make income a function of promotion, which means the maintainers least comfortable with self-marketing earn the least, regardless of how important their work is.

2. Open core

Paywalling features works commercially and costs you something real: every feature decision becomes a pricing decision, contributors lose interest in improving a funnel, and the community starts reading roadmap changes as revenue moves. This is a viable business, but it is a different project than the one you started.

3. Corporate sponsorship

Excellent when it lands. It requires a named contact, an invoice, a procurement process, and renewal every year. It is a sales job on top of a maintenance job.

The fourth option: fund the hours, not the users

Every one of the models above asks your users for money. The alternative is to be paid for the hours you already spend in the editor, by advertisers who want to reach software engineers, with nothing asked of anyone who uses your project.

That is what AdMyChat does. You install an extension, keep working exactly as before, and earn a share of what advertisers pay for one small placement beside your session. Your users are never shown anything. Your repository is never touched. Your licence does not change.

What this does and does not solve

Being straight about the shape of it:

• It scales with your hours, not your popularity. A maintainer of a small library who codes 30 hours a week earns more than a famous maintainer who codes two. Whether that is fair depends on what you think is being paid for. It is paying for time.
• It is not a salary. It offsets costs and rewards hours. It will not replace employment on its own.
• It stacks. Nothing stops you running donations, sponsorship, and this at once. They draw from entirely different pockets.

What is measured

Only timing signals: whether an editor window was focused and whether input happened recently. Never source code, file names, prompts, or keystrokes. For a maintainer working across client codebases under NDA, this is the difference between usable and disqualifying, so it is a design constraint rather than a setting.

Getting started

Sign in with GitHub, GitLab, or Google. An administrator reviews every signup before it can earn, which is what keeps rates high for everyone already on the network. Balances cash out at $15 to PayPal, or by Wise or bank transfer on request. If you refer another maintainer and they are approved, you earn at a 100% revenue share for three days, and referrals stack.