Yeah, so I was working for Meteor in 2015, I think… Wait - when was that? Yeah, 2016. Early 2016, that was when I started working on Vue full-time. Before that I was working for Meteor. At Meteor I already started feeling the pull of this unsustainability of having a day job and at the same time maintaining an open source project that’s growing more and more popular. The amount of issues and maintenance and the growing scope of the project was just – it just started feeling too much to be something that I work on in my spare time, and I felt it was not sustainable.

I started seriously thinking about which do I actually want to work on more, and I think the answer was “I want to work on Vue more.” So that’s when I started to think “Is there any possible way for me to turn this into my full-time job, instead of something I can only attend to in my spare time?” I guess that’s kind of the question a lot of other open source maintainers are also asking right now. I didn’t really have a good answer at that time. In fact I still don’t, because the Patreon campaign was more like just an experiment or an explorative move on my part…

I thought that there were people sustaining themselves by creating content, and I compare that to Vue.js or I compare that to an open source project. I felt like “I’m working on this project and it’s creating value for people. If I’m creating value for people, is there any way for them to somehow give back in a financial form so that I can sustain myself?” and this kind of model seemed probably the most direct model that I see. If someone uses my software and they feel like it has helped them, and they don’t want the project to die, then at least they have an incentive to give me some money so that I can keep working on it.

So I started the campaign. I didn’t really think too much about it, and I just threw it out there. It turns out people actually wanted to give me money, and some of the companies were really generous. I had the tiers of like $100/month, $500/month, and there was one tier that was $2,000/month. I put it out there just thinking no one would probably ever do it, but there was this company called Strikingly - it’s a startup… They were a Wi-Fi company, but they somehow moved to China because the founders were Chinese and they couldn’t get a U.S. visa… And they don’t actually use Vue, but they have this fund that they just use to donate to open source projects that they felt were doing a good job. So they signed up for the $2,000 tier and they were basically saying “We liked your project, we want to support you, so we’re just giving you $2,000/month.”

That was a really huge help in the beginning. They did it for six months, and that was probably like – if it wasn’t for them, I don’t think the campaign would ever grow to what it is today. Today we have like $9,000-ish a month, which is already enough for me to somehow sustain the family and all that.

[ ] I still consider myself extremely lucky to have pulled this off. Whenever some other open source maintainer asks me for advice, I’m always hesitant to recommend them going this way because I don’t feel this is something that’s easily repeatable, and it really depends on how much traction you have gained, and it depends on what financial situation you’re already in. I have some money saved up, and I was basically planning to do it for free for a few months just to see if it would ever work… But it turns out I got to $4,000/month pretty fast.

I was almost able to sustain myself, and it just kept growing until it became – today I’m pretty proud to say I’m fully sustained by open source work.