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Out of an abundance of desire for you to be happy and this project to succeed:

You should sell something. You have a variety of options for "something." [+] You will always make more money selling something than selling nothing. Your project is orders of magnitudes too small, and not popular enough with the right people, to subsist on donations from developers. (Sponsorships are a thing you can sell, and are not donations. They're priced at 3~4 orders of magnitude higher than donations, are budgeted out of places other than "charity", and can be sold rather than hoped for.)

You do not owe anyone an apology for choosing to sell something. You do not owe yourself an apology for choosing to sell something. You do not need to mention the economy or your personal economic circumstances. It will not successfully motivate anyone to pay you a thousand dollars. No lawyer in the country does that. No doctor in the country does that. No teacher in the country does that. You being compensated for your professional labor is not an outlandish request. It is the default. This will discomfit some freeloaders in your community. They contribute no patches or money. Let them wget the binaries; do not allow them to wget an iota of your stress budget.

[ + ] A specific example of a thing you can sell that can't be said of every OSS project that hits HN: There exist literally thousands of businesses on the Internet which host websites for other businesses. Some of them allow their customers to upgrade service to include an HTTPS certificate; many don't, would like to, but cannot offer that given technical constraints. Caddy is a drop-in [ ++ ] minimal-risk option for any less-than-galactic-scale hosting company to offer "HTTPS certs at scale that just work" for e.g. the local bakery.

This is something they can offer to clients. You can sell them on the desirability of offering it and let them promote powered-by-Caddy "free SSL certs for everyone purchasing our hosting." Any measurable uptick in business from a hosting company running at anything greater than dormroom scale is worth $$$$. You can say "There's a repo on the Internet which suggests a way that you can get this done; if you'd prefer to ship it by next Tuesday, there's a glide path available for $THOUSANDS."

[ ++ ] On reading more closely it isn't quite "drop-in" but given the amount of value that would surface for users and the additional revenue possibilities that would suggest prioritizing that fairly highly. The joys of product management. The specific feature you probably want is reverse proxying; happily, Go is practically a language built to write reverse proxies in.




Thanks for your comment, patio11! I don't regret adding a payment box to the download page. My only regret right now is that I'm not a more tactful/skillful writer. :) Sponsorships are a great idea; I think many companies would benefit from having their customers use a web server with automatic HTTPS, or who believe security and privacy on the Web should be easy.

I admit it's a little weird transitioning from undergrad where you pay to do things when you're told to, to a professional living where you do things because you're good at it and are paid to do it.

Addendum: The business value in a "drop-in minimal-risk" option for hosting companies is appealing. If I do end up going the business plan route to earn a living, it would probably be something like that.


It's a little weird, but you'll get used to it.

Caddy looks great, and I might end up using it for my next project. If I do, and I make money off it, consider at least one sponsorship secured. :)




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