Ask HN: What is the chance of getting a donation through support on GitHub?

3 Forgret 2 8/30/2025, 10:43:21 AM

Hi, I'm a student developer and I wanted to get paid right now, and I heard that you can get paid through sponsors on GitHub, but I'm wondering what the chances are that people will do it? Not everyone wants to spend money.

Please share your opinion and tell me who may have managed to get money this way?

Comments (2)

sandreas · 3h ago

I've been an open source developer for a long time now and enabled gh Sponsors around end of 2021. My most popular projects have around 1.3k and 450 stars. I claimed to donate all sponsored money to charity and in 2022/2023 when I was actively developing I earned around €260 in total and donated the full amount.

After my second child was born I did not have any time for developing any software. There were still some sponsors, but most of them canceled their sponsorships pretty quick (which was totally OK).

So I would say it depends on your projects, your luck and your consolistency how much you can earn, but i'm pretty sure your earnings will be nowhere near what you could earn by having a job or being a freelancer.

So if money is your primary motivation, I would pick freelancing/working for a company...

Forgret · 1h ago

Thank you very much, after graduating from university I definitely started a company, but it would always be nice to get the money earlier.

Ask HN: The government of my country blocked VPN access. What should I use?

Ask HN: Why isn't perplexity coding anymore?

Ask HN: Anyone using their own custom text editor?

Ask HN: What to learn for math for modeling?

Are You Tired of AI?

Ask HN: What do you think about GFW?

Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series?